I woke up this morning asking myself this question — shortly after I asked myself, ‘Why am I awake?’ and, ‘Why is the world still here?’

See, I don’t like blogs. Not quite in the way that I don’t like MySpace — but I don’t like blogs. My dislike of blogs is very nearly equal to [possibly greater than] my dislike of many of the websites I’ve been to since I first got online.

But that’s never really kept me from having a website, now, has it?

Let’s go back about three centuries, to 1996, when I first got online. My various searchings led me — eventually — to gremlin.net.

Back then, websites weren’t as…’complex’ as they are today. They weren’t simple, but normal, average people like me couldn’t have a whole bunch, and there weren’t a number of special coding languages that one had to learn just to make a modern website.

Eventually, some time after meeting Gremlin in his own chatroom, and being invited to his messageboard, I broke out my own rocks and sticks, and started carving out my own website from…this larger rock — geocities.com, at the time.

I didn’t know the first thing about coding back there [and some may argue that things haven’t changed much], so I used Netscape Composer to learn code. I also learned how to ‘view source’.

With a little help from Gremlin [he taught me how to use tables to get what I wanted], I had my first website — an arguably tasteful little geocities site.

Content was an issue, though. I didn’t have much in the way of a personal life, and I didn’t really have an interest in much of the world. I liked Jurassic Park, I didn’t like Titanic, I had a friend who wrote poetry. I used to draw things, and I didn’t suck at that. That was pretty much it — some of my friend’s poems, a list of people who actually disliked Titanic [my very first troll-magnet], my first gallery – full of stuff I drew instead of stuff I photographed. There was also a ‘news’ section, a links section, and, eventually, a messageboard hosted by Gremlin.

That page was also where The Lab was born. That section never really went anywhere beyond hosting this paper I did arguing that Roswell really was all about aliens. Okay, actually it was hosting me making fun of the paper I did arguing that Roswell really was all about aliens….

I no longer have this paper or those pictures, that old messageboard doesn’t exist in any working form, and I no longer have that geocities account. I think the last I saw of any of it was in 2001, but I can’t be sure.

2001 is when I got evilcoffeechick.com.

For the first…three years, the site was almost entirely flash-based, which meant that it was a bitch to update — which didn’t really matter to me, because if I felt like I had anything to say, I’d say it at the messageboard. Or, when Gremlin was doing What’s New stuff somewhere other than the board, I’d sometimes write one of those. My site was just there to hold information that nobody really cared about, and a bunch of transcripts of stupid people.

I had a few ambitious projects connected to the site, but they all died like neglected houseplants. One of them, the DPD, is in the middle of being tranplanted. The DPD was really my first attempt at what people might consider ‘blogging’ somehwere other than a messageboard. New article on the main page every day [roughly], and all that.

In 2004, I started thinking maybe I’d like to say some of the shit I had to say on my own site. Crazy idea, huh?

By then, I knew about ‘blogger’ and all that, and I really, really hated it. Mostly because it was very much like live[dead, rotting, stupid]journal.com, and all those other little online diary sites — and that’s really all I ever saw of blogs. That and people reposting news stories, or being severely political. So, either insipid or…so grownup it’s fake.

…but some of the layouts were similar to things I’d been doing elsewhere — copying from Gremlin, mostly. And I liked those layouts.

So I got over my dislike of CSS, and modified an old guestbook script to allow me to update my index more easily.

That lasted…about three posts over the course of a year. Then we changed servers, and I discovered WordPress, and I got a little more over my dislike of the concept of blogging…mostly because it was exactly what I’d been trying to recreate for my various projects.

Blogging is a hell of a lot easier to deal with when you look at it a certain way — from the back end, where you don’t have to see things like, “and so like there was this party omg and we went and lucian was there and omg he was with that b*tch from the club again but the curtains were nice and they played this song that was [insert lyrics] and it spoke to me. [insert poem]. ~*~ TheSicklySweetCandyGoth ~*~” or, “[political drek].” It also helps to understand that you’ve been doing it all along, just in a way that requires slightly more effort.

I’m all about the less effort — that’s why I finally gave in and learned CSS, and partly why I now ‘blog’.

Another reason ‘why’ is that I haven’t really changed what I’ve been doing all this time — I’ve changed how I do it, and where, and how I manage what I’m doing — but what I’ve been doing has remained somewhat the same since day one. The only things that’ve really changed are that I can finally do what I want to do without too much effort, and there’s a new word that sorta describes what I’m doing.

Unfortunately, that word got attached to a bunch of suck. It’s not all bad in the land of ‘blog’, though — SomethingAwful.com is somewhere in the neighbourhood.

…the lazy-thing is settling back in, and I don’t really feel like thinking about this anymore. Perhaps I’ll have more to say later. Then I can have a series of posts on this subject.

How exciting.