Saturday, November 27, 2010

The Story behind my entry to Blogging

My idea of blogging a year ago was a vague and hazy remembrance of some boring newspaper article which went like

A weblog or blog, as it is popularly known, is an online diary, blah blah blah”

Obviously, I wasn't very interested.

As much as I like technology, the idea of blogging didn't appeal to me at all. I have no idea why. I just preferred taking a piece of paper and actually tracing my thoughts onto it, I guess. Somehow, its more personal, more satisfying. So I chucked this nugget of information to one of my vast recesses of unused memory units and forgot all about it.

Well, years after I read this article and entered college, my English teacher asked us to submit our group assignments on a blog. She guided us through the steps of setting up a basic blog on Blogger and she was trying very, VERY, hard to get us interested in English. After all, we were computer science students, we'd hopefully take interest in front of a computer.

Here are a few facts about my group:

Half of them were lazy.
Those who weren't were forgetful.
Nobody cared about English class that much anyway.
The time we were supposed to use to update our blog was put to good use on Facebook.
I am very sincere, love English and computers.

Predictably, I ended up doing pretty much the entire blog that semester. Only one post is not mine, nevertheless was typed by yours truly.

Did I like the blogging experience?

It wasn't a blogging experience to be frank. However, I learnt a few rudiments about posting. I was surprised that I was pretty comfortable typing my thoughts as much I was writing them down.

And then, of course, the next natural step was to set up my own blog. All very well said and done except I had no idea WHAT to blog. Naturally, Google and Wikipedia came to my rescue . All of them indicated that blogs are simply a reflection of your interests. So I chose poetry. My very first poem was An Ode to First 4 Silver with the exact same template as my English assignment's. I was very happy to see it published. You see, I had had a website way back in fourth grade on free hosting tripod with Trellix Web. Launching a website is definitely more draining and my dad helped me with FTP and all that. Or maybe he was doing that for his site. Anyway, before I digress further, I just want to say it was satisfying.

My first real shock came when I had my first follower. It was my classmate and she did it right in front of me but still the concept was fascinating. Soon, I started badgering my friends to follow. The only obstacle was my blog address which was ritaskeeterscoop before. Unless you are a fellow Harry Potter fan, this address is absolutely not congenial for followership. After sometime, I stopped. I blogged a few poems and got a few comments for My Dear poem. After that it was super-stagnation. People would comment on my Facebook profile but nobody would actually comment on or follow my blog.

It was time I revamped my blog. Also, I didn't want to display just one interest. At the dawn of template designing, I used a cute picture window template with a leafy background. It was not very personalised, not very me. So I got down to the brass tacks, browsed quite a few blogs and got a flavour of the entire thing. One of my favourites is Coconut Chutney. I could really connect with her blog on most counts and found the posts hilarious and absorbing. The height was her translation of Padichi Paathen song. I nearly fell off the bed even as I read that she stopped with two lines in fear of the sport of chappal throwing.

And this is the result.

4 comments:

  1. hey..some of your group members even contributed a post in that english blog. of course it was appreciated by many :P so..not everyone in your group was lazy :)

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  2. of course not, only half of them were lazy :-P and their wonderfully appreciated contribution was sadly veto-ed out by me on humanitarian grounds of not hurting someone very important, namely me :-)

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  3. thanks :) I really hope you don't stop writing.

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  4. Am honoured :-) thank you so much ! I won't give up on writing!

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