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Proof that in blogging years, I’m prehistoric

ELEVEN YEARS.

Well, ten and a half currently… but on November 6, this year, I will have been officially blogging for 11 years.

How the hell did that happen?!

nov-6-2004

Here’s my first ever blog entry, on my first ever blog, which I found by accident this afternoon. It’s… very pink. It’s also cringeworthy to read and contains way too many personal details about me and others for a public space, hence the blurring.

My 18 year old self was rather fond of text speak (though I’m cutting her some slack as it was, after all, 2004) and appears to have considered a blog a sort of mass email system (like an early form of Mailchimp, I suppose).

The “previous posts” on the right hand side has three more posts from the same day. Obviously addicted from the start. I’ll be honest, I’m glad it’s now been offline for some time (!) The about page is linked to my current Blogger account for comments, hence the up to date photo. I wish they kept old ones!

But as I’ve been referring to myself as “blogging for nearly a decade” for some time, it’s rather nice to have stumbled across solid proof of my first foray into writing online (and only because I was trying to work out how to change the “Carla at Ducking Fabulous” which crops up whenever I post a comment on a Blogger blog.)

At a time when all sorts of things are changing and when I’m feeling a bit at odds with myself about my direction and my progress on certain businesses and projects, it’s amazing to see, in black pink and white, exactly how far I’ve come since I started. Some of you will be reading this on my website, but for reference and anyone on Feedly, Bloglovin or any other platform, here’s a screenshot of my current front page (all my own self-taught work, including the graphics except for the doodled magic wand):

Screenshot 2015-04-27 17.34.23

 

To give some context to my ancientness in blogging terms, Technorati has published a State of the Blogosphere report every year since 2004. In October 2004 they were tracking around 4 million blogs, 40-odd percent of which hadn’t had a post in three months. There were 4.6 posts per second, or 16,000 per hour. That’s roughly 384,000 posts a day.

In 2015, as I write this post, Worldometer (which uses Technorati data) estimates that 3,704,924 (and growing every second) posts have been published today.

I’m currently working through Cerries Mooney’s amazing Calibration Kit and Aligned series, and in the process have been facing my own biggest business demons – comparisonitis and self doubt.

Stumbling across this proof of my status as blogging pioneer/dinosaur (as we’ve seen, eleven years is a ridiculously long time in the world of technology and the internet) has given me a new wealth of confidence in myself.

In my ability to learn code, CSS and a new platform (I switched to self hosted WordPress in 2008); my persistence; my natural abilities (this is probably the only thing I’ve done consistently for more than a decade, other than basics like eat, sleep and brush my teeth); and the incredible improvement in my clarity, direction and the look of my online homes.

It gives me a boost against my tendency, especially after a couple of glasses of wine, to freak out about entrepreneurs who have been going longer than me and are correspondingly more well known or successful. It addresses the fact that anyone who was writing a blog that could be understood by someone over the age of 20 had a far better chance of succeeding than I did back then. It reminded me that I’m a competent self taught photographer, blogger and website maker (among other things) – which is no small achievement.

It also opened my eyes to the fact that though now I can’t imagine being without my businesses, at the time I simply wanted to record my life – and all of that is ok. 

Something seemingly small and simple has helped me to rewrite my personal history more truthfully – and stop beating myself up for not having been in business since about 2006, like so many of the mentors I follow. And now I have an official blog birthday to celebrate!

I wonder if I knew, writing that first post which “felt strange”… that all this time later I’d still be doing it…?