Writing a blog was something I've honestly always wanted to do. A childhood dream that I didn't have the ability to make come true when I was younger, both because I didn't know enough about computers back then and neither did i have enough time on the computer to learn about it. Many years later, the situation changed and I could have started my blog any time i wanted, but I always kept thinking to myself:
I thought I had missed that time window between 1998 and 2006 where having your own blog was cool. Before mainstream social media, when the best way to share your interests with your friends was to have a webpage titled something like "Sally's beekeping bee-log, bee welcome!", and when "surfing the web" meant searching up personal pages of likeminded people, hoping you'd find the one other person on the WWW who liked pictures of snails' shells as much as you did.
But the point is, because of these thoughts I have always dismissed the idea of creating a blog as a hopeless nostalgia-fueled fantasy, when in reality it was something I could have done the whole time!
Sure, it's not in vogue anymore, but the point of making a blog was never to be popular, was it? Recently, I met a friend who showed me his own little personal page (and it was the cutest thing ever!), and who then introduced me to Neocities. Browsing through these webpages together made me feel like a child again, seeing all these handmade websites with a personal touch, searching up random interesting subjects and seeing what kind of pages people have made about it. Turns out "Surfing" the web isn't dead at all!
Perhaps what I was missing all along was the realization that making a blog is just creating your own little corner of the internet -- writing about something you like, designing something that you enjoy visually, putting photos that mean something to you in a place where you'll come back and look at them - unlike the gallery on your phone with 2,000+ photos of "special moments" that you'll never actually remember - Doing all this is personal. It's like writing a diary, but with more fun tools to work with than pen and paper, and in a format that is a little easier to share with your friends. It doesn't really matter if anybody is reading it or not, and if you are, well - you're awesome!
In the end, writing this blog has been even more fun than I would have imagined it to be in my nostalgia trips. I'm searching up the internet for information to write my malware articles just like I did when I wanted to learn things back then. I'm excited about taking pictures of monotonous everyday scenes so I can upload them as banners to my blog. And something about writing all these paragraphs is just so relaxing!
The moral of the story is - if you're like me, and you haven't made your own page yet just because you think it's not hip anymore, then just go make one right now! Find a template you like and start writing! It's easier than you think, and I promise you won't regret the time you put into it. And if you want to, tell me about it and you'll make me happy!