One thing I do like, though, is talking about myself. And another is talking
about blogging. One of the biggest attractions of Blaugust for me is that it
offers an opportunity to do both. Or perhaps not so much an opportunity as a
license.
Of course, I shouldn't really need a license to blog about whatever I want.
The longer I blog and the more Blaugusts I endure - Enjoy! I meant enjoy! -
the more I lean into the mantra: your blog is your blog. When you're
there, no-one can tell you what to write or how to write it. Your blog: your
rules.
If that's how it works, though, I could blog about blogging every time I get
the fancy, couldn't I? I could write about AI, a topic that fascinates me
more, the more difficult it becomes to talk about without getting blocked or
unfollowed. I could put up a music post every day for a month or write about
nothing but the single game I was playing, every day, even if it was a game
no-one else was ever going to find remotely interesting.
Okay, that last one I have done. More than a few times.
But you have an audience, don't you? And a responsibility to the readers. I
suspect almost every blogger with a publicly visible blog feels that, at least
a little. Even if they're not convinced anyone is reading. But they
might be...
As the blogging years drift by, though, I feel more and more keenly that the
person I'm writing for is me. I love comments and I love interactions between
blogs, bouncing off other bloggers, echoing or riposting their posts, leaving
comments scattered everywhere, the way Beryl leaves her toys around the
house.
But if all that went away, I'd most likely still write a post most days, even
if I knew the only one reading it was going to be me. Even if it was offline,
although then I guess it would just be a journal and I'm damned if I'm going
start journaling.
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| A small fraction of the whole. |
As time goes on, I find I have less and less interest in attracting new
readers or sending my words out to be found by the world. Instead, I have
fantasies about taking the blog private; sending invitations to everyone who's
ever left a comment and an email address so they can carry on reading if they
want to, letting it be known to the select readership that gets me that I'm
open to referrals, should they know of anyone that might like to join the
private club. Then closing the doors.
I guess it's a fantasy. But Blogger does, in fact, offer that as an option. Or
it did when I started this blog sixteen years ago. And I considered taking
that option, very seriously, before finally opting to let my words be seen by
anyone who cared to look.
OMG! He's got to the point! And after less than a dozen paragraphs! That might
be some kind of record.
Inventory Full is my first blog. It's my only blog. So far, anyway.
I thought about starting a blog maybe as early as 2009. By then I'd been
reading other people's blogs for two or three years and I'd reached the point
where the comments I left on some of them were so frequent and so lengthy it
was starting to get awkward.
I wasn't the only one. I remember Tobold tetchily suggesting to
Nils, who seemed to write more in the comments some days than Tobold
wrote in his posts, that perhaps Nils might think of starting a blog of his
own. Nils did and his blog became quite popular for a while. It certainly used
to send me a lot of traffic in the early days.
It's gone now. But
Tobold's blog
is still here. Tobold's like the weather. He's always here.
After a few months thinking about it, I looked into the options, which
at that time seemed to be Blogger or WordPress. There were
others but I forget the names. I only seriously considered the big two.
I made accounts with both. I still have the WP account, which is very
handy for commenting on WP blogs, but I've never used it for blogging. I set
up a test blog on Blogger and published a
Proof of Concept post
on February 5 2010. Then I did nothing with it for a year and a half.
I'm fairly sure the main reason I prevaricated so long was the usual newbie
blogger's fear of Bad Things Happening if I did. Actually, you don't hear it
mentioned so much these days but back then and certainly into the days of the
Newbie Blogger Initiative, one of the more commonly expressed reasons
for not starting a blog was that the internet was full of horrible people who
would come to your comments section and kick virtual sand in your face.
And it does happen. Probably quite often if you post things that are likely to
annoy unpleasant people. I get the odd snarky comment and a few extremely odd
ones, now and then. One or two people have felt it necessary to flounce out
and make sure everyone sees them go.
But mostly, for most bloggers, it's never an issue. In fact, as most bloggers
would probably be only to quick to tell you, the real buzzkill of blogging
isn't the snark and spite in the comment thread, it's the total silence.
Comments of any kind, especially when you're starting out, are rare.
Eventually, I managed to convince myself it was worth the risk. If it all went
horribly wrong I could just stop, anyway, couldn't I? On July 30 2011 I
published
my first proper post. Looking back on it now, it's astonishing how much of a template it is for
the 3,674 and counting that followed.
That first post was called "My Bag", which is the title of a song by
Lloyd Cole. I linked to the song in first line of the post. And now
here I am,
linking to it again.
The next four posts, which was as many as I wrote in the whole of August back
then, so that was something that didn't set a pattern, all used either the
names of songs or song lyrics for their titles. At one point in the run, I
think I went for several years using nothing else, to the point where I had to
do quarterly posts explaining the references and linking the songs. It got
entirely out of hand for a while...
That first post was about the game I was mainly playing at the time, which
happened to be Rift. It was about the inventory system, something with
which I was obsessed. I named the blog Inventory Full and the first post was
called My Bag. You do the psychological evaluation.
The tone of that first post is conversational, not to say chatty. It links out
to another blogger, who just happens to be Tobold, the very same blogger I
mentioned earlier. Good old Tobold. As I said, he's always with us.
And never with us because Tobold never leaves comments anywhere. He does, or
did, link to other bloggers so he's not completely outside the social envelope
of the blogosphere but he doesn't join in events like Blaugust or even mention
them. Like the cheese, he stands alone.
Tobold didn't leave a comment on my first post but someone did. I don't think
I realized at the time how unlikely that was. I'd love to name-check whoever
left it now, a decade and a half later, but I can't because whoever it was
chose to be anonymous.
Many blogs, possibly most blogs, don't allow anonymous commenting. I haven't
always allowed it myself and I'm frequently on the verge of disabling it
again. I only enabled it a few years back because commenting on Blogger had
become so difficult people were complaining they couldn't get their comments
to appear. Well, when they managed to get one to work, they were...
That first post was just under 750 words long. Short by my current standards
but already setting a marker. I do not write short posts. I wish I
could. I have tried. I just love the sound of my own voice too much.
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| Image for illustration purposes only. |
It was illustrated, of course. Badly illustrated, I'll give you that, but
there were pictures. There have always been pictures on this blog and there
always will be. In fact, the only time there ever haven't been pictures is
when I wanted to make a point
by leaving them out because to me, a post without pictures is thin gruel.
Looking at that first post, the background is the same darkish blue I've
always used. The banner is the same picture of my pet cat from the
EverQuest II beta. The sidebar is the same as it is now, unchanged.
Well, of course it is! When you change any of that, Blogger changes it for
every post there ever was. All your old pages look like all your old new
pages, outside of the posts themselves, which stay the same.
Or I think they do. Hard to tell, because in my case nothing ever has changed.
In the lifetime of the blog I've only ever changed the layout once. And that
was only to get wider margins.
A lot of bloggers fiddle with the settings and swap the themes every so often,
just to keep things fresh or because they get bored. But here's the thing. I
got my first blog just how I wanted it almost from the start. Other than a
couple of tweaks, I've never felt the urge to change anything about how it
looks.
About the only major difference I can see between those early posts and the
rest is that I used to think it was fine to jump straight to the text without
a header image. It's not, of course. I was so callow, then! I wonder when I
learned better?
Over the years, the posts have gotten longer. Sometimes a lot longer. The
range of topics has expanded. It was all MMORPGs around here once. Now it
hardly ever is.
There have been experiments in style and I've gone through fads and phases
that would almost qualify as Eras if I was young enough to get away with using
that buzzword unironically. But basically it's the same blog. I write
long, rambling blog posts about gaming, music and popular culture and I do it
more days than I don't.
I've often thought about starting a second blog, most likely focusing on
music, but in the end I always come back to the benefits of keeping everything
in one place. Don't lets anyone mention eggs and baskets...
This, then, is my first blog. My very first blog.
For now...
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