At the time, I think I had been vaguely aware of what a weblog was for maybe about a year. But it took me a while to realize that a blog was exactly the outlet I needed: I was living in a foreign country and I had a lot of stories and pictures I wanted to share with family and friends in America. I had been doing the old-fashioned mass email thing for a while but it always kind of bothered me that I was inflicting my stories and pictures on people who might not really be interested.
Then the Indian Ocean tsunami hit, at the end of 2004, and a friend of ours who went to Sri Lanka to help with the relief effort started a blog to document his experiences. Jeremy thought it was a brilliant idea and I did, too. So I started a blog, mostly at Jeremy's urging. Now any family or friends who wanted to read stories about our time in Syria could just go to a website instead of sifting through an email. At that point, my only regret was that I hadn't started the blog sooner, or even had one going when we lived in Moscow (I still regret that).
Blogger asked me to name my blog, and it only took me a few minutes to settle on My Adventures in Syria. I figured I would probably change it later when I thought of something better. It was based loosely on an article I had written while in Moscow called "My Adventures in Gypsy-cabbing." That, in turn, was based loosely on that movie called Adventures in Babysitting. I don't know. It seemed to make sense at the time and I didn't stop to think that including a geographic location in my blog title would later cause me a headache.
Five years ago, when I started blogging:
-I had no idea what comments were. I had only given the URL of my blog to family and friends so when a random person commented on a post I was at once shocked, embarrassed, and flattered. From then on, I realized I had an actual audience somewhere out there so I tried to think of more interesting things to write about. I wish I had had Google Analytics installed back then (well, I wish Google Analytics had existed back then), because I think I had quite a bit of traffic going on and I still wonder where it all came from.
-I was one of the only people blogging out of Syria. I think there may have been about eight of us at that time. The Damascene was the big one, written by a Syrian named Ayman. Syria Comment was written by a foreigner but I think he and I were just about the only two Americans blogging from Syria back then. Now there are dozens if not hundreds of Syrian blogs - this, despite the fact that Blogger is often blocked there.
-Combining pictures AND text into one blog post took a lot of effort. At least it did for me. There was a program called Hello, and it wasn't very well integrated with Blogger, and it only worked about a fourth of the time, if that, on our sketchy Syrian internet connection. As a result, I usually posted pictures separately from the blog post they belonged to. It was just easier that way. I remember the first time I got a picture to actually stay in a blog post - here - and I just kept looking at it and looking at it. It was like magic. The words you see under the photo was my way of sneaking in some text. The Hello program allowed you to type in a file name for the picture so I just typed in what I wanted to say. Obviously, that wouldn't have worked so well for a longer blog post.
When we returned to America I didn't know quite what to do with My Adventures in Syria. I didn't have a lot of time to think about it, though, because Miriam was born and Jeremy (once again) had the brilliant idea to start a blog for her. Now, I don't want to get all Al Gore on you and say that we invented the concept of a baby blog for our far-away family members to enjoy. But I do think we were some of the first people to figure out that a blog was so ideal for that situation.
I started blogging from Jordan in 2006 (and continued in 2007). In the fall of 2006, I finally put aside my qualms about blogging from the US and started My Adventures in Tucson. And you know the rest of the story.
When did you start blogging? Why did you start blogging? How have things changed for you?