Tony tagged me to answer some blogger questiony things, but I spent waaay too long "answering" the first one, so I'm leaving the second one for...tomorrow? But I'm not making any promises.
Question One: Why do you blog?
Urm...I think originally I did it for more/better site content. Let's take a look back...
When I built my first website back in 1996 (whoa! more than 10 years ago!), it was a piece of crap. An even bigger piece of crap than this one. I was hosted on Angelfire, and I had blinking text, a collection of animated gifs scavenged from other sites, an overly-complex background image (also stolen from another site), and a small library of plain-text jokes, stories, and surveys that I'd copied from my telnet and HoTMaiL (remember when they wrote it that way?) email accounts. I almost wish I still had that old steaming pile of a site, but I don't. I don't even remember what the url was - I tried guessing just now, but if it still exists, I can't find it.
I got tired of Angelfire always having problems with their shit, so I moved my site to Geocities in 1997. They sucked worse. Geocities was TERRIBLE. I thought it was stupid that I had to say my site was like, geocities/stupidcity/catcates or whatever the url was at the time (I really should've held on to that stuff, just for amusement's sake), and when they started using popup ads, I bailed.
I used my school account (originally wwu.edu/~u163597, then later wwu.edu/~cat) from the spring of 1997 until about spring of 2003. When I switched over from geocities I decided to make a fresh start, and create a site that looked attractive and cool, so I ditched all of the pirated and/or animated images, and spent HOURS (sometimes I was in the computer lab overnight) learning photoshop and html, practicing different tricks and techniques, and creating, refining, and changing new site designs.
What I ended up with was a blah website with graphics that used about 3,000 photoshop filters each. For awhile it was purple on black, then for a long time it was blue on black, then gray on black, then brick, cream, and black, then it was something weird and gross like ultra shiny 3-D looking royal blue graphics on periwinkle. Then I started messing around with the art department's scanners and doing weird found-object style graphics on white.
I was frustrated because I really wanted to have a cool website, but it just wasn't working out. So I did a lot of thinking and web surfing, and what I realized was this: my content was crap.
Most of my site designs had a splash page, a home page with a few lines of text, an email link, a resume, the occasional essay or image, and not much else. Inspired mainly by the now-defunct Anarchista.com, I decided to create categories on my site where I would focus on specific types of content - recipes, photos, art projects, an autobiography, and (drum roll please...) a JOURNAL.
That idea flopped. I couldn't cook, and had no recipes. Flickr hadn't been born yet, so I had to host my photos on my school account, and consequently there weren't very many. I was in art school, but hardly ever bothered to photograph any of my non-digital work, so I only had a few links to example websites, flash movies, and photoshop images. And I never really got around to creating a bio, but I DID create a journal.
Initially I tried keeping it up manually (by adding text into an html table that I then manually re-uploaded after every new entry - blech), and then I tried LiveJournal. As you can see, that didn't last long. Free LiveJournal is, as Sam and Brett would put it, pretty "G." In order to fully customize it, you had to pay. We were living on Top Ramen and stale baked goods at the time, so I wasn't about to PAY for my journal.
But eventually I HAD to create a good website, because I chose new media as my graphic design concentration within the art department. We had to have online portfolios to graduate. So I created an online portfolio, and ditched the journal idea. It's on a CD somewhere, but as I've already wasted enough of my time on this post, I'm not going to upload it. If you went to my website between 2001 and 2004, you may have seen it...I forget exactly when I took it off my site.
Initially I had a dope-ass splash page that I loved, but since I wasn't an illustration major (and I was therefore not patient enough to create a whole website in that theme), I scrapped that idea, got rid of the personal link completely (since I'd scrapped the journal and couldn't think of a good bio), and went with a strange, minimalist, photographic-squares-on-white theme for my portfolio instead.
I graduated from WWU Spring of 2002 and I knew eventually they'd do some housekeeping and delete my account, so I purchased catjackson.net in early 2003. Eventually I got bored with the idea of using it only to house my portfolio, and decided to go back to using it primarily as personal space. I didn't use LiveJournal for very long back in 2001, but I had really liked the concept of an online journal, so I decided to try that out again, as an easy way to create content.
At the time (as is evident in my first Blogger post), I thought "Blogging" was something you could only do through Blogger. I've never really been hip with the cool lingo. But I enjoyed "Blogging," and it quickly became the main content (and later the only content, despite my sporadic posts) of my site.
So now...here we are. Back to the reason I gave in the very first sentence of this ridiculously long answer: I wanted more/better site content. And though my blog only fits in the "better" category because it's better than nothing, it definitely helped me achieve the "more" goal.
And there you have it - an impromptu, completely unrequested, History of Cat's Online Existence.
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