Newbie Blogger Initiative: Why I started blogging…

Why did I start? Do you know I honestly have no idea. Back in 2005 I got into growing veg (this was waaaaay back before I’d begun to play computer games like I do now) and I wanted a photo record of my efforts. I did a little googling to find out the best place to do this and came across my first blog. It seems incredible now that there was a time I didn’t know what a blog was (or a WEblog as my old mate Dale Innis stubbornly sticks too :-D) but there was. The blog I came across was called Pumpkin Soup and was rather beautiful and very entertaining and pretty soon this was what I wanted to do – not just put photos of my handiwork on the web, but write about my experiences too. I browsed through the blogroll for further inspiration and began to piece together how I was going to do this whole blog thing myself. To cut a long story short, I soon had a self-hosted WordPress blog up and running and spent a very happy couple of years blogging about my garden, my house extension and my (still unfulfilled) desire to keep chickens.

But everything comes to an end and in late 2006 I discovered the then much hyped Second Life. Soon my tendency to go hell for leather into a new hobby had kicked in and the garden was soon forgotten. The blog became as barren as my veg patches and soon lapsed into a coma from which it has never awoke (it is still out there though).

Yet not all was lost as, from the ashes of blog 1.0 arose a brave new world of blogging, this time about Second Life and, more specifically, about my attempts to tell a story through it. You see, where as my gardening blog had been a record of my efforts and chance to chat with like minded folks, Second Life offered that in the body of the game itself and at first I had nothing to blog about. Until, that is, I hit upon the idea of using the blog for creating and telling stories based on my travels in the amazing virtual world of SL. I had great fun running multiple stories over the years, but as time went on I found myself writing about the wider aspects of the world I loved so much as well as the amazing people I met, and the wonderful things I found or did there.

Since then I haven’t looked back. There have been times when I’ve blogged feverishly, times when I’ve run dry or found myself kidnapped by real life and been unable to blog, but throughout it all this blog has been my friend, my travelling companion through the ever shifting landscape of my online life. In 2011 I left Second Life and found my way into Middle Earth playing Lord of The Rings Online and now I’m moving towards Guild Wars 2 but no matter where I go, this blog will go with me and record my journey. In the end that’s why I blog.

In my next Newbie Blogger Initiative post I’ll pass on some of the lessons I’ve learnt over the years. Frankly knowing what I know, I wouldn’t expect too much 😉