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Despite what people think, personal blogs are NOT dead! What we post on social media now would’ve been posted on someone’s blog 20 or so years ago (though a lot less personal, because anyone could read it).

Me & Blogging

I’ve been keeping a blog for almost 20 years now. 😱 When I decided updating a static page on a Geocities PageBuilder site with dated entries was too cumbersome, I switched over to Diaryland and then LiveJournal.

This worked great, until I wanted something a bit more “me”? On my domain that I just bought recently. Greymatter was THE self-hosted option at the time, so…yeah. Except because it didn’t use a database (like MySQL), all data was stored in static files–I THINK as HTML files. Whenever you updated ANYTHING (the templates, entries, etc), the entire blog needed to be rebuilt. The process was automated, but it took a while if you have a big blog.

Then WordPress (which succeeded b2/cafelog) came along as another self-hosted alternative. It was written in PHP, which I was just starting to learn at the time. I was hooked. 😍 I’ve tried other self-hosted alternatives like Chyrp, but could never let go of Wordpress.