weblog as place

When I think of my weblog as a "place" I think of this little rectangle into which I type my words. It seems like I look at this side of it much, much more than I look at the "public" side where the results are displayed. I've never really understood why this box that I type in must be so narrow. It takes up such a small part of the real estate of my screen. At least it's bigger than the comments box.

I've been blogging for about six months and I still haven't quite determined what my relationship is with the blog. I've kept journals off and on for years and I expected it to be somewhat like that but it isn't. At least not for me. At times it seems like producing a column for a newspaper. Although I've never done that so how would I know? Even though I try not to be, I frequently feel pressured to write something. And I am much more particular about what I write than I ever was in a journal. At other times however I feel that I am writing to certain people who I know read my weblog as I read theirs.

P8150014.jpgTo explain how I got into this I would have to go back about two years. One day at work I went into the snack bar to get a soft drink and found a book on HTML that had been abandoned there. I got interested in it and took it home for the weekend. Our ISP provided us with a small amount of space for a "home page." Like most people I had never even thought of using it, but over the next week I started building a site. Tricia had recently given me a digital camera and I needed a forum to display my pictures. It didn't have a lot of words at first. Later, when Tricia and I remodeled our kitchen, I started to document that project. Unfortunately only about a dozen of our closest friends and relatives ever visited any of those pages, and of course nothing linked to them.

I didn't know anything about weblogs then. That came much later after I started to follow links in online news magazines. When I first started blogging myself, I modeled my writing after those political news blogs, but that didn't seem right for me. What I did feel comfortable about was writing about my garden. For years I had been intending to start a garden journal, so I decided to make my garden the main focus. That limits it's appeal. I may never have a lot of readers, but I am having a lot of fun with it.

Part of the Ecotone series on "Blogs and Place."

Posted by Bill Hopkins on August 15, 2003 08:54 PM
Comments

I started my blog with the intention of eventually making it a website, and the website was aimed at helping people garden in a cold climate. I also feel like I'm writing a newspaper column, and feel the pressure to keep posting and not disappoint the audience that I hope is there but don't often hear from. In my case, I would say this is self-imposed as part of the goal of the website.

Before I discovered blogging I was writing occasional essays and sending them off as emails to all my garden buddies. For me the blog was an expansion of something I was already doing. I love writing and I love gardening, and I would much rather read a garden blog where I follow one person's experience rather than go to GardenWeb where all the responses are rather short and aimed at answering questions. So keep writing!

Posted by: Kathy at August 16, 2003 06:37 PM

Liked what you had to say here, Bill, and I'm glad you've decided to expand form your original garden theme. I'm a longtime journal-keeper too, and it's funny to compare these two experiences. I always told myself "you're really writing for an eventual reader" even in my journal, but it was really quite different from this.

Posted by: beth at August 17, 2003 09:29 AM