Best 20th Anniversary

On May 31st, 2004 I made my first blog post over at briggie.blogspot.com. I had taken a Memorial Day hike along the Appalachian Trail with some friends and I wanted to share pictures from it. I thought maybe a “blog” (whatever exactly that was) would be a good way to do that. A little googling lead me to the blogger platform and I signed myself up. I picked the title “Steady Mobbin’” because I thought my friend Lucas from high school would think it was cool. I did not consider that the blog title and blog address should be the same, so they weren't. And back then blogger didn’t do its own photo hosting, so I couldn’t figure out how to get pictures on the blog. So my first post ended up being about a celebrity sighting at Benny’s Burrito’s during my post-hike burrito meal. Three years later I would make an blog anniversary post with the pictures from the 2004 hike.

Soon after starting the blog I figured out how to host pictures on other sites and paste the html code for the pictures into my blog. All those hosting sites are gone now so all the pictures from the first few years are gone now, too, making a scroll through my early archives a bit of a depressing visit to a boneyard.

The late-mid 2000’s blog boom came and went and yet I kept posting. In mid-2015 I decided to start a “more professional” blog with its own URL after I had had a few articles published at another website. This was perhaps a foolish pivot, but here we are. I manage to post about monthly now, sometimes twice a month, and look back in awe and wonder at how I had so much to say or post so often 20 years ago. I guess it’s because I didn’t have a smart phone to look at?

I think my most popular post ever was this one about sea otters and river otters.

I am still proud of my three long form posts,
This one about a family trip to Disneyland
This one about a wild goose chase at the Mexico City temple
And this one about the last day of my mission.

Blogging has been a fun hobby. Back in the day I was getting up to 200-300 hits a day — which back in the blogging boom wasn’t as many as other friends were getting, but still — now I’m getting about 15 hits when I make a new post. Yet I still have a nice little time when I open squarespace up and start choosing which pictures to post. So will I blog for another twenty years? Really I don’t see why not! Thank you for reading and visiting.