OK, so Lorelle says that everybody has a story, and that goes without saying that our blogs have a story too. And she sure is right, and she’s challenging us to write about the story of our blogs! In fact, the biography of this blog is immortalized in the “About The Blog” page, but since I’m in the process of revamping my blog, I’ve decided to do away with the (full) story of my blog and replace it with something short and interesting instead :)

But since we’re talking about the stories of our blogs, I’m reproducing my story here:

This is my third attempt in blogging. The first two blogs did not die a slow death. And I did not forget the passwords to log in either. Here, my blogging history goes like this (if you are interested, that is):

I visited Yvonne’s blog after reading about her plight in the papers. I remember spending a couple of days scrutinizing the whole blog and I was amazed that somebody so unwell could still keep an online journal alive. Then I came to this page where she wrote about her fund-raising ideas – about printing T-shirts and selling them to the public to raise enough funds for her up-coming surgery.

From the fund-raising post I went to Jimmy’s and the first article I read from his blog was this. It was a good read, no doubt but when I showed J the entry, he forbade me to continue reading his blog because he said it was filled with profanities. I was like, “But Jimmy’s a funny guy! His posts always make me laugh!” but no, that did not convince J enough.

After reading a couple more blogs in the blogosphere, I asked my sister whether we should start one together since I didn’t know if I would have enough time and material to sustain a blog. She was already a blogger then, hence we started a joint-blog – which is now defunct.

After a while, I wanted my own blog, but since I could not think of a blog title, I settled down with Nutshell in October 2005. But I later realized that the blog URL was too revealing and I might not be able to blog properly knowing that people I know would be stalking me. Nonetheless, I learnt about the essence of blogging while maintaining Nutshell and I had fun tweaking the template and adding stuff onto my sidebar.

And then I learned about WordPress. I liked the Categories function in WordPress but could not find a way to implement it in Nutshell, which was powered by Blogger. Out of a sudden I stumbled unto a WordPress.com page and I immediately signed up for an account. It was about a month later that I got the invitation to join WordPress.com – by which I had already forgotten about the request.

I contemplated but eventually gave in to the temptation to move to WordPress.com on New Year’s Day 2006 when I was home alone, sweeping and mopping and cleaning the house. My WordPress blog, entitled pelf-ism is contagious, lasted 5 whole months.

It was only in late May 2006 that the idea to host my own blog came to me. I spent almost a month hunting high and low for affordable domain and web-hosting prices. I was afraid that I would be tied-down by the exorbitant web-hosting price every year once I started hosting my own blog.

I am not sure whether I was thinking properly when I paid for the domain name and web-hosting package. All I remember was feeling excited. And I started making plans to move over to my new blog. I was thinking about the template, the sidebar and the links. I managed to get Jason to help me with the setting up of the WordPress database and every other related stuff. And I started to experiment with the template files.

This new blog was officially launched on 1st June 2006, which was also my 25th birthday. A couple of days and four posts into my new blog, I messed everything up. I accidentally erased all my posts and drafts, I accidentally erased my existing WordPress database and got myself a new database with a new username that I disliked and password I could never remember. I almost cried..

Once again Jason offered to help and he adviced me not to mess with my own files unless I knew what I was doing. Yes, Jason, I will remember that :)

Hence I am now presenting to you, my third personal blog – hopefully this is also the last one *crosses fingers*

A lot of things have changed since I wrote that. I’ve gone from maintaining a single personal blog to maintaining three. I’ve gone from worrying about my annual hosting fee to not having to worry about it for the next, what, 10 years :D I’ve gone a full cycle from staying away from placing ads on my blog to writing sponsored posts to staying away from sponsored posts unless they’re really something I’d recommend.

And they say life is a learning curve :)

So what’s the story of YOUR blog?