One Year of Blogging 🎂

Today's the day! One year ago, I've launched this blog.

Cake's on me.

The personal website

On June 9, 2023, I've launched my personal website, including my debut post about writing. Ever since I became a user and explored the early 2000 web, I've dreamt about this. I believe that having a personal website that represents you on the internet is something that a social media profile can never live up to.

I love my personal website. Working on it is my favorite hobby. I could spend hours building new features, making little design tweaks or updating my now page.

I actually had my first personal website as a teenager, until it was hacked by bad internet pirates. The thing is, back then I didn't know what to put on my personal website anyway.

Until blogging entered my life.

Blogging

If you wanted to add more personality to a personal website, you should probably start a blog. After all, it's your thoughts and feelings on the internet. What's more personal than that?

When I started this blog, however, I hadn't yet fully understood what a personal blog was all about. More than anything, I felt that I had to write about a certain niche only. A blog needs a theme, is what I thought.

That theme, in my case, was accessibility.

So, I wrote about accessible web forms, accessible doors and labelling the web.

But then I got frustrated. Do I really need to stick to my theme? Would it be so bad if I wrote about something more personal?

Forcing myself to write about my theme started to restrict me. I didn't look forward to writing anymore. Writing started to feel more like a chore.

It took me a couple of months of misery before I realized that it doesn't have to be this way. I wrote about my predicament and called it "how not to write", where I convinced myself:

You can write about anything.

And then, I did.

Freedom

After I turned one of my blog posts into a talk and turned that talk back into a blog post, my 2023 reflection was the most personal blog post I had written up to that point.

Slowly, my blog got more and more personal. Slowly, I embraced the freedom that I now allowed myself to have.

I can write about anything!

Blogging was fun now.

The world needs software that works for everyone

Of course, I'm still a user experience guy, so when I get furious with the software that I use, it's nice to blow off some steam. I dedicated blog posts to using watchOS 10 and the Morgen calendar to reflect on bad user experiences and let the World Wide Web be my audience.

Long-time readers of this blog know that I care about privacy, no matter if it comes to email privacy or phone number privacy.

I also regularly ask myself what kind of software we use and what kind of software we probably shouldn't use. But of course, no judgment here.

The personal web

After I had my personal website for a while, I had a better understanding of who I was on the internet. I introduced a now page to document what activities I spent my time on at any given moment.

If the /now page is about sharing what you are doing right now, why is there no /where page to share where you are right now?

My contribution to the personal web is called the where page movement and with it, I invite everyone who has a personal website to do just that.

Travel

Most recently, I started to write about the thoughts that I have, while I travel around the world.

I launched a travel blog (in German), but every once in a while, I think about meta topics around travelling such as what this world sounds like or what driving a scooter in Vietnam without Maps feels like.

One year of blogging

There's a thought that has been on my mind for a while now. There won't be a better moment to put this thought out there than on the day of my one-year-bloggoversary:

Writing a blog is the best thing I ever did on the internet. ✨✏️

If you want to celebrate this anniversary with me, I'm happy if you reply by email. We could have an emoji cake or something.

To so many more years of blogging! 🍾