Blogging in the Real World

I first started blogging way back in 2002-2003 on my first site, Exhibit 5a. My intention back then was to be sort of a gallery site where I would feature my own work and also the work of my friends. It wasn’t even a blog when it started – I was manually coding every single page. Before too long I embraced blogging platforms starting with Blogger, then Typepad and finally WordPress. And instead of galleries of artwork it became a full time blog of me ranting and raving about politics and people who pissed me off on the way to work or elsewhere. I had an “open letter” series which had such gems as “Open Letter to Ten Year Old Gamer Asshole” and (this one is food related), “Open Letter To Skinny Bagel Girl”. Damn, I was a bit of a snark monster, wasn’t I? Snarky McSnarkson. I kinda miss that actually.

I never really put much thought into what I was writing about at Exhibit5a. I posted several times a day, whenever the spirit took me. My cubicle job allowed me to do this more or less (although I would get the occasional rebuke). Back then before blogging became a corporate thing and before Facebook, if you posted regularly that was all it took to really have some traction in the blogosphere. I got a couple of mentions on Gothamist and BoingBoing and even had my site featured on the cover of The Stranger in Seattle. At my peak somewhere around 2005 I had more than 50k unique visitors a month. Pretty amazing, considering the amount of inane bullshit I blogged about. Want to know the number of people (aside from my friends that I already knew) who I met in person through the blog? Zero. I don’t think I ever met a single person, out of all of those readers anywhere except in the comments section. I lost interest and pretty much let the site go to seed sometime in 2006.

And now in 2011 I’m blogging once again. I arrived here in St. Louis in July and started blogging again here at Shoot To Cook. I’m a bit rusty, for sure. It is certainly much more difficult to provide structured content on a single subject (in this case, food) rather than just bitching and moaning about what I feel like every second. Which isn’t to say I don’t have enough to write about as far as food goes. There is so much I want to write about that sometimes I get stymied with decision making. On some level I feel like I’m being too timid and need to get back to that spontaneity. My blogging voice is coming back the more that I write (and I think I’m starting to relax a bit more) which is making it easier. The neat thing is that the community here is amazing and I’ve got all kinds of twitter friends who are fun to talk to, supportive … and I get to meet them in person. You know, offline. In the real world. Even if it currently is a friggin’ cold real world at the moment. Seriously, I’m ready for it not to be fifteen degrees outside.

In any case, I am very excited about the doors that this blog is opening for me here and the opportunities that I am lucky enough to take part in. For example I got to spend the afternoon today meeting a whole bunch of local bloggers and food writers and this guy taught us how to make bread salad:

Full post on my Companion Bread/Niche experience tomorrow!