5 (five) ways of getting back into active blogging
or at least getting closer to
1st approach
here we are again, hello world, and/or welcome to this blog. whatever the first lines on this blog are. it doesn’t really matter. for me it’s most important getting started again with a blog after being absent from blogging (I don’t really like this term) for such a long time. in many ways it feels good getting started again, and trying to feed my obvious but so many times neglected personal needs. neglected for a number of good good reasons, and neglected for an even larger number of excuses.
some of the people reading this might know me already or have known me from other online activities like my.opera (R.I.P. … best online community ever having been screwed up and brought to silence 1 year (already?) ago) or they might know me from a so called social media site called Facebook. maybe they just know me in “real life”? the latter seems not be likely. anyway.
as I said, there have been a lot of good reasons and excuses for keeping me silent on the blog side of life (the “real” one and the “online” one). but there are reasons enough for getting started again. I won’t invent the wheel of semi-private blogging all over as a new experience at all. I know this, but everyone having had the experience of being online and part of something like a community nows as well, how hard it is not doing this especially when your daily life, your choices in life and your thinking has been influenced by doing this and sharing this with other people. like I, myself have experienced this after having started a blog. way back then, it seems now. in 2008 as part of the community “my.opera”. 7 years ago. it feels like a much longer time than what the bare number seems to suggest.
7 years in online time. being on the data highway, call it what you like. it’s quite a long time, longer than I’ve expected in the beginning and until now. not long enough.
another reason for getting started again here is. directly connected to what I’ve experienced as a member of the my.opera community. knowing about the limitation of getting people to know just by talking to them “online”, just by sharing ideas and thoughts, hopes and fears it’s even more fascinating for me just to recall the massive impact this activity had on my life and the decisions I made through the last years. it still influences my life in good ways, in ways that aren’t so good, but most of all in ways that make me wonder about how lucky I have been.
people who don’t know anything about me may ave a look on my about site here on the blog or on about.me
starting a blog (not so different from re-starting and/or starting all over again) isn’t the easiest thing to do, and it took me quite a long time to get settled and feeling comfortable again with the thought of having my own blog again. for those of you having been on my.opera this long kind of introduction might be boring, I can’t help it. but for others. and after some time, I think, I’d be less focused on this. for others it might be interesting ‘though I think it’s not a unique experience at all. I met (online) others who knew each other on a different platform my.space and then met again and/or kept connected via Facebook again building up a similar group and experience for themselves. this is not what media suggest it would/could/should be like having “online” friends and and a daily life where these friends and contacts are playing an important role for the individuals. it’s often written and discussed about “how real these friendships” and/or relations are and how much one could or should rely on this. the only thing I can say is that my life has been different from all what is said about this topic by so called experts.
I wouldn’t be a happily married man, I wouldn’t be a father and I wouldn’t have met some of the most amazing people. if, yes, if I wouldn’t have answered a personal message at times. and so the story went ahead and will be told again on this blog. if I just needed only one reason for starting a blog again. this would be enough. but there are many more reasons. sometimes more than I could recall, even if I took enough of my time just reading through my archives. I’d like to say there are at least so many reasons as I had the chance to meet friends on my.opera. each of them individually part of my life and part of my story. even after such a long time, these people are important for me, they are a natural part of my thinking, they are part of the way I go through daily life, they are part of conversations, they are part of what I read and listen to. and some of them aren’t even part of this world any more, but still a part of me.
no matter how much one gets involved with others and their lives online, no matter in which way a community is build. there are always people taking other ways, passing by, but leaving footsteps. our memories will preserve these steps, for longer than anyone could predict and sometimes for just a shorter while, but nevertheless intensely enough to remember. and sometimes people’s lives are different, not an ongoing thing any more, life can be difficult, hard and tragic. as it’s part of nature. and lives end due to illness and due to car accidents. that’s how life is, online and for real, and each time life turns out this way. it hurts and leaves people alone with the bare fact that someone is gone, not here any more.
most of my friends from the my.opera community know that I’m talking about our friend Dennis O’Reilly who died in a car accident on Feb 11 this year. “do I really need a good reason for restarting blogging?”, I asked myself after having realized that he was gone and the flooding of memories came to an end.
until now I had a bit of a bad feeling as if I were using the fact of one of my friends being gone as a good reason for restarting a blog again. but then, I guess, isn’t this the best reason for this? it won’t stop life from being what it is and it won’t stop memories and thoughts about it less painful and hurting. but t will get me back to where I came from and help me to get away from taking this for granted in my life. like I said, I know how lucky I was getting to know people and having the privilege of being able meeting people I only knew from e-mails, comments and/or blogs. but I never wanted to take this for granted. it’s so much more than what it looks like from the outside or for outsiders. it’s worth this effort and it’s worth much more.
so here we are again. I’ve chosen WordPress like so many others but I’ve also chosen vivaldi.net (as a test bed, ’cause I think it’s the least complicated platform I could use). besides this blog I’m online on several different services and sites, you can follow the links via the “social icons” in the widget area if you’re interested in knowing more. over the time, I guess I will write something about these different platforms / services as well.
for now this is the blog I will restart again, but I won’t put up online anything from the days when my.opera was still a vibrant and and the best online community of all. some things you might see agin, but in a different way and/or look. I will try to recall and tell the story again, and I will to make it possible for readers having an insight to what is called private and daily life as well as I have done this on my.opera … and I will try not to do this on a daily base, that’s not what I have in mind with this blog.
after some time I will migrate this blog to a self hosted page but this and what kind of troubles one has to go through when doing this … you might read about here … oh, and there will be some new things, different from what I have done 1 year ago because life went on.
thanks for stopping by and thanks for reading
