My Single Mom Life

I was just checking out when my hosting account is due, and saw that I need to pay it on February 16th, 2009, and that made me remember just how long I've been doing this whole blogging thing.

I moved here to Florida from Maine on June 1st 1997, Sebastian's birthday, and when the boys and I got our own place, for my birthday that was coming up on March 1st, my sister bought me my first brand new computer and internet connection on dial-up in January 1998.
I started a blog on Tripod on January 11th, 1998.
I've been blogging for 11 years now.
Blogs had just begun, the term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997.
Very few people were doing them, I didn't even call what I was doing "blogging", I hadn't even heard the term or seen it, I was just writing to my "diary" on Tripod.
It was free, I hand coded the whole thing, but the name was always My Single Mom Life.
I started the whole thing as a way to have a cheaper way of keeping my parents and friends back home in Maine, updated on how we were doing down here.
Calling from Florida to Maine was too expensive, so I started an online diary talking about the ins and outs of our lives, my job, and the boys at daycare and summer camp, and starting to go to school.
I didn't even have comments on the thing, and because it was all hand coded, I had to start each page moving my older entries down by hand so it would be in descending order so the newest entries would be at the top.
It took a bit of time to do that every day.

I started seeing more and more people doing the same thing but calling it blogging.
They had actually started before me, long before me, but they called it blogging.
I was fascinated and absolutely hooked.
One of the very first blogs I ever saw in real blog format was TampaTantrum.com, it now resolves to Robyn's Shutterblog.com site where she talks all about her photography work.
Another was Promoguy.net, and through his comments, I met Rain-Cloud, who gave me some space on her hosting and gave me my first MT blog.
The Blog Tree.com lineage of my "parent bloggers" has currently exceeded it's bandwidth, but I'll keep checking it.
They were my parent blogs, they all took some time to explain things to me, teach me how all of this worked, and I've been hooked ever since.

I missed my own blogiversary a few days ago on January 11th, but that's ok.
Over the course of the years, I've had multiple hosting, the Tripod thing, then my first MT install, then some free hosting on a site that shall not be named, then paid hosting with a reseller who shall not be named, (it all went very very bad with all of the blogs being shut down with less than 24 hour notice) and then I finally went and bought my own domain name and hosting on February 17th 2004 with ICDSoft.com, and have been using them ever since.
I pay $96.00 per year, but it's worth every penny to me.
There's no downtime, ever, except the few times that I have screwed things up and ran to their help desk begging them to fix my mistakes, which they always do with the absolute best customer service ever.
They answer support tickets within 15 minutes, keep you constantly updated, and in 24 hours, they contact you again to make sure that it's still fixed and working right.
The one time it did go down and wasn't my fault, was because of a massive ice storm in the north east, and they posted to their main site every hour on the hour with status updates, and they rented some servers from another company to get us all back up and running within 8 hours.
They didn't charge us any extra for any of that, they are constantly giving us freebies like more space, more bandwidth, all for free, I love them, so when the 16th rolls around, I have no problem paying to renew my hosting.

11years doing this.
I can't believe it's been that long, and blogging is so popular now, it seems like everybody is doing it, and everybody has their own unique way of doing it, and it's still as fascinating to me today as it was when I first started.
So happy blogiversary to me, even if it's a few days late.
But today is someone else blogiversary, Julie of JuliesJournal.com, has been doing it since October 2004, so hop on over there today and wish her a happy blogiversary too.
I think she's still doing all of the blogging conventions that are going on in Vegas right now, but I'm sure she'd like to get some happy blogiversary comments.