Me: “Do letters count as blogs?”
Coye: “Yes! Only big fan can read!”
I started to write blog when I was 11 when QQ zone was quite popular among primary school students, I shared feelings and thoughts about everything in very random ways and always waited for comments and likes from my friends. I also spent time decorating the webpage by select the components for the header and background, which now I think it is the earlier version of no-code website builder.
With in 5 years, I had written 116 blogs (Such an achievement!) including book reading notes, random thoughts, messages to friends(?), popular challenges(?). Though I do not remember any specific content now, I can still recall the moments when I stayed in the library lab room and typed something down.
I moved to Blogbus at some point with Coye and at that time it was not meant to be shared with anyone I knew(of course except Coye), but we did know some other bloggers from the platform. Blogbus allowed you to customise the pages with HTML and JS. For newbie like me who had no idea what HTML was, generous bloggers also shared the templates for you to copy paste. If I look back now, it was the very first gesture of open source behaviour(open source is the best!!). We always admired the blog pages that were customised to have cute navigation bars and simple styles, but we were not able to have one :< Then one day we could not log in and there was an unofficial announcement in a discussion group saying “blogbus will not be shut down so do not worry”, and after 16 years it is still not back to operation for us to log in, and the domain has been released for sale. There are some tutorials about getting the articles back through Wayback Machine, but since my blog was set to private, I didn’t find anything. So we lost all the articles and related memories of our jounior high school time. It is the first lesson about centralised server risk that I learnt :<.
At high school, I had very little time to use my computer, and when I have time, most of the articles were about the gloomy feelings of relationship, grades and rankings. To share life updates and thoughts, I wrote letters to my friends and hoped they could be successfully delivered to the other person’s home. Sometimes it was a full 5 pages of content written on the paper we tore off from sketch pads, for which we had to pay more postage since it was overweight. I still keep all the envelopes and letters, and I feel really good every time I reread them and I recall the stories I was happy about or worried about that I barely remember now.
Then we had smartphones. The batteries were spent on posting thousands of posts on the social medias and many platforms that few people know for blogs. On each platform I had more than 100 blogs(so many fragments are proof that I always have many thoughts). Also we have multiple 手帳 where we handwrote tasks, diaries and sketches. Though from some point on, less available time in the adulthood and the lacke of desire to express thoughts online kinda made me stop posting blogs and even stop noting feelings down.
But I have always known that writing things down is good. It is a great way of leaving traces of life, sorting thoughts out, and creating a source of your own chronicle. Besides, at this moment, when much thinking can be outsourced to other intelligence, it is even more necessary for us to write down our own thoughts. The reflections we have are helpful for our brains, and I also consider writing a practice for healing. So it is time for me to resume writing :>