Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Henceforth, this shall be known as "Jay's Blog of Good Intent".

But first a few things about myself. At the time of writing, I am a thirty-year-old, public-school-educated, single Filipino male. I still live with my parents.

At one or a few points in my life, I decided it was nice to write, not so much as to be read by friends and/or complete strangers, but to have something to read that is of my own, in some future time when I'm older and presumably wiser than I was when I was still writing them.

Thus, I wrote, starting sometime when I was 17 or so. That was in college. Quite a late-bloomer, admittedly, and in that I even decided to want to write at all, credit should be given to my friend, Dave, who, before I even set my pen to write something other than the usual school-required writeups and sutff, introduced me first to the joys of reading.*

Before blogs were all the rave in this internet, and back when storage space was not as cheap as today, I used to have a 15-MB free web hosting account on geocities. Well, actually, at the time of writing I still do. It was (is) called "Jay's Literature Page", which, as serious as it may sound, is nothing really but a place where I "publish" a few of my more readable writing exercises online. In fact, that's basically what it is... not so much as an actual Literature page as it is a Writing Exercices Page. If one would want to get technical, that is... I think...

For one reason or another, after some 10 years of providing free web page hosting for HTML-ers like me, geocities will be closing down October this year—and with that also will go Jay's Literature Page. Not for a short time after hearing this news, I was mildly resentful, and blamed that blogs and (mostly) HTML-illiterate "bloggers" have killed Jay's Literature Page.

Of course, I understand that that is not really the case. You take something that gives free service to anyone, and make it last 10 years, what with all this new technology and all this blog sites for example who offer services as free as they do, and there are people having preference for the new technology and everything... I understand that at a certain point, you'll have to close down eventually.

Not really something drastic or dramatic. It's the same reason you discontinue using old computers in favour of faster ones. Or replacing cellphones.

Since I started this blog—then temporarily called "Jay's Test Blog"—I haven't really come to discussing why for all my mild resentment (snobbery?) towards blogs and bloggers in general, here I come starting my own blogsite. What it is, really, is that I'm giving in. When I heard about the plans to close down geocities, I was thinking I would either: a.) disappear from the online world completely; or b.) yield to this new medium that mostly everyone is using anyway.

Obviously I didn't choose to disappear completely—well, not yet anyway. And as for deciding to have a go at this thing, I can only hope that I get at least as much readership as I did back when I was in geocities, which is about 3 readers/month (including me). Then again if no one reads this, I can always be happy to have something to read, I don't know, in 2015 when I'm bored or something.

If they haven't closed down blogger.com by that time, that is.

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* In this just-started "Jay's Blog of Good Intent", you should, of course, expect me to intend talking about (reviewing?) books. And that includes books that I enjoy =).

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