My Blogging Journey
In the last 90's I started a GeoCities page and eventually bought a domain name, randomly named wonderfulmonds.com, after a minor league baseball player named Wonderful Terrific Monds III. The site had absolutely nothing to do with baseball, however. It was mostly just essays I wrote about being a parent of teenagers and stories about my life. I dedicated a part of the site to Vietnam Veterans, started a web ring for them and featured photo and letters and poetry they sent me. I got a lot of traffic as a result, about 20K hits a month but lost the motivation to maintain it after relations with me father soured. He was the reason I'd created the site in the first place.
In 2013 my wife and I hiked the Appalachian Trail on a five-month honeymoon. I used an iPhone 5 to write a blog entry every night in our tent or whatever hostel we happened to be in with pictures and details from the day's journey. It attracted readers from all over, many of whom wrote us letters of encouragement or even care packages. It is still online, and I've referred many people to it who have had questions about attempting their own thruhike. It was called The Trail Journal of Lefty and Hush, after the traditional trail names we adopted during the hike.
Late in 2023 I saw an article about the Default Apps page that Robb Knight created after an episode of the podcast Hemispheric Views. I wanted to get in on the fun but didn't have a blog. This led me to open an account at Micro.blog. I bought a domain name, Amerpie.lol, and started posting there and haven't stopped. I use it not only got microblogging but also to post photographs and tech articles as well as my/slash pages and a weekly list of interesting links.
A few weeks later I started two other blogs: AppAddict for reviews of Mac an iOS apps and Living Out Loud for non-technical posts.
When many of my online peers moved over to BearBlog, I didn't want to move anything I was already working on, so I decided a links blog there, Linkage.lol where I post one link a day with a short explanation and an image.