One Year Ago I Started Blogging

It’s been a year now since I discovered the world of blogs and started blogging myself. I’ve been surfing the internet for years but found very few personal websites. Must be due to the daunting task of coding the site yourself and the dearth of free webspaces around.

Around 2003, features in several online newspapers led me to being a regular reader of several political/news blogs. It was only when the Sassy Lawyer was featured in the online version of the Philippine Inquirer did I learned of this whole new world of Pinoy blogosphere. When I combed thru Sassy’s links, I realized that a lot of the tech savvy Pinoys are knee-deep into it – since then they became my daily read. Then in Tito Rolly’s blog, I tried commenting but anonymous commenting was turned off. So I was forced to create a login in Blogger.com, and consequently create a blog. Sassy is the one I credit in ‘introducing’ me to pinoy blogs but Tito Rolly led me to that extra step in creating one. The fact that there are a number of sites offering free webspace for bloggers plus free online blogging tools also helped convince me to give it a go.

At first I really don’t know what I would do with it much less what to put in. But a peek at Sassy’s Pinoy Cook (previously Radical Chef) food blog fired up that passion in food in me. I have always longed for somekind of a ‘scrapbook’ for the recipes of dishes I cook – both the tried and tested and the experiments. A food blog would just be perfect and that’s how I started blogging with English Patis.

We travel around and visit places during weekends and I wanted to record and show friends and relatives of where we’ve been, what we’ve been up to. But I don’t want to mix it up with my recipes in the food blog, thus born this Desarapen Tales. I couldn’t come up with a better title so I just got a word from a Filipino children’s nonsensical song. When I was young we used it to figure out who is ‘it’ in a game, just something different from the usual ‘pompiyang’ and ‘jack en poy’ (paper scissors stones) – but I digress.

I’ve enjoyed blogging since day one starting with trepidation, even in just commenting in other blogs I was quite nervous. It’s a good thing the blogs I frequented early on answered even the most mundane hi or hello I put in their comment section. I have to thank also Batjay for encouraging me and emphasising that the most important this in a blog is content. I agree wholeheartedly.

Blogging has improved my writing skills immensely (if ever I have one). Why I haven’t written anything ‘creative’ or essay-like since I was in high school. College writing was just a series of technical jargon blurbs after another so I really can’t count that. But other than letters and long emails to friends, it’s only now that I got to crunch down and pour my mind’s content into the pensieve of blogs. It has also heightened my awareness of the food I’m cooking and eating, of the places where we go, of the people I meet, of the situations I’m in. It also introduced me to the technical side of web design and programming. I’ve been a constant user of PCs and web browsers but the magic behind it is much covered in haze for me. And with the limited time I have as a working mom I couldn't really cover much in terms of learning webpublishing and design unless it's needed at work.

The best best best of all rewards of blogging for me are the warm, friendly, funny, helpful online people I met. Some of whom I have met in person, some of them already phone pals. Yet still a lot are regular email buddies. They come from different backgrounds, ages, genders, professions, persuations, and what have you. I can tell you they made my life so much richer. Thank you my dear online friends and here’s to more years of blogging. Cheers!