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If you’re on this site, you might’ve guessed that it wasn’t my first dip into the amateur web development scene, so to speak. The rest of the articles on here surely confirm that, talking about my amateur web development adventures in the 2000s. My web skills have descended since then, but it was still a huge part of my life. I might not have kept up with the tech, but I do love the internet. How did I end up here, though?
Let’s discuss exactly how and why a teenaged girl ended up with blog in 2002, and some of the consequences of it, too.
Blogs, like most internet technology, didn’t really have their moment for a while. The term “weblog” was apparently coined by a man named John Barger in December of 1997. This shortened to just “blog” over time, becoming the term we all know and love.
Initially, though, most websites were quite static, or designed and assumed to be so, anyways. Diaries and personal journal pages existed, but they weren’t common, nor the majority. Most sites didn’t feature that tiresome timestamp-and-comments-section format we see constantly nowadays, too.
I discovered the concept of a weblog via the Digital Divas, an internet-based women’s collective of web developers. The Divas were exceedingly cool, to the point where they’d fought Microsoft over a copyright case and won. I just knew I wanted to be like that. Such heroes. Life goals! And how? Blogging!
Luckily, the Digital Divas (or one of them, at least) provided a helpful guide to starting a first blog at the time. It was called “Blogger Too?” It covered everything I could’ve ever wanted to know about Blogger itself, the strange static site machine thing-y prowling around making blogging possible online.
Blogger worked very differently back then, more like 11ty, really. I remember that I hosted my first blog on Geocities because that was actually possible very briefly. I quickly made the jump to shared hosting, though, and picked up a new content management system called Greymatter. Noah Grey, the creator of the latter, seemed like total life goals, too, so that was a thing, as well. So many digital heroes!
I eventually received the precious gift of a domain name for my sixteenth birthday. I won’t share what that domain was, though I’ve checked and it isn’t much on Internet Archive (splash screen archived; little else). Either way, I got a domain name as a gift early in the 2000s, and after learning about server side includes? I felt unstoppable.
What did I blog about? All kinds of things.
I kept a running series of posts about my quest to do well on the Advanced Placement English exam, for example. Those were all about whatever I was reading for school, and all the various snafus and roadblocks I encountered therein. The worst was when I realized I’d been mispronouncing leviathan for weeks, but I memorialized that in blog-gy prose, too!
I ended up playing off a lot of my posts about my AP English quest, too, writing about my newfound love for books like Gulliver’s Travels and my interest in the Early Modern era in general. I didn’t write long authoritative posts because I obviously could not, but instead would post little updates as I learned new things or fought with people about specific issues.
Fights were a huge way of learning for me (and others) back then online, sadly, but most weren’t too terrible. I remember arguing about the nature of the mind and the concept of the tabula rasa, was it a reality? I never believed that and said as much. others disagreed. Topics like that all ultimately filtered from forums and LiveJournal comments into my new spacious blog.
I wrote a lot of poetry. Most of it revolved around my original fiction, which was just terrible at the time. It revolved around these alien ladies with rainbow hair, all of whom were constantly falling in melodramatic love with each other and some star-struck human girls.
It was not not not inspired by Zenon nor any weird attraction there as a youth, I swear. My teen writing was not exactly Shakespeare! Believe me when I say the poetry proved I liked both guys and girls in a huge way, though. Nobody online cared, so why should I?
I enjoyed writing both the fiction and the poetry about it, though. While I never posted the stories, the poems did get some positive reception. Odd. considering just how poorly-written they were. I think it comes down to the audience being other teenaged girls, who felt that it “spoke” to them? It’s not as if I was the only young, pretentious, and ridiculously awkward bisexuality-driven teen online at the time..
I did make the occasional “political” post, as much as a sixteen-year-old girl from rural American can do that. This was at the height of the Iraq War and the panic over terrorism. As a vaguely left-leaning individual, I certainly had a lot to say that was counter to what I heard at school. Where better to express it than online, where tons of other people agreed with me that Bush was Hitler or whatever?
On the blog, I also posted “artwork” (a term I use here loosely) that I made in Paint Shop Pro. This typically was a manipulation of a photo I’d taken or found. I had passionate fondness for editing images of my school life to unrecognizable oddity. One in particular was called “Fearful Pigeons,” and it gained traction for some reason? I would eventually enter a whole online Photoshop contest using Paint Shop Pro (and lose).
Another one wasn’t edited much except the addition of strange beams of light, and I called that one “Inferno.” It didn’t have any flames, just (fake) beams of light refracting off of a photo I’d taken of lockers at my school. I wrote a poem-like statement beneath it describing how the light represented the “light of human reason” in Dante’s Inferno. I had just read a bit about that at the time, and tacitly grasped some of it (but not well).
My favorite class was always art, because I could often just finish my work and sit on the computer in there. Few other kids wanted to touch it. Also, there was the pottery wheel to think about, the watercolors, and my attempts at depicting those rainbow alien ladies.
One day, though, I arrived in my art class to be greeted with an ambush of sorts. The teacher, Mr. Jenkins, pulled me into the kiln. The kiln. Not joking. This wasn’t that odd, given the kiln was a huge area of the classroom and rather private. I initially thought he was going to try and get me to narc on someone else, but things got weirder quickly.
“Why would you put your diary on the internet??” the man hissed. I was flummoxed. Of course there were those who did such a thing. LiveJournal already existed, as did things like FreeOpenDiary. But me? I’d never “put my diary on the internet.” It was a confusing accusation, but I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. All I could do is deny it.
“Oh yeah?” replied Mr. Jenkins. “You didn’t? Then what is this?”
He whipped out a few poorly-printed inkjet pages of my weblog.
What was I supposed to say? A weblog is not a diary, obviously. I tried my best to explain that it’s a bit more like a newspaper column about the literature and art, but pulpy! That fell on deaf ears.”You’re not a news person,” was all he said.
It soon became apparent that Mr. Jenkins wasn’t the only teacher at the school who didn’t understand blogging as a concept. In a way, it wasn’t their fault. You couldn’t expect that kind of niche culture to permeate so quickly. Still, they were awfully rough with me, just because I had a blog. Ostensibly, the reason was because I mentioned the teachers at the school in the blog, though. I want to say, for the record, that I doxed nobody.
The blog, rather, contained an occasional reference to a teacher’s (real, actual) last name. Obviously, “Jenkins” wasn’t the art teacher’s real name, but in the original blog, I made comments like “this piece is good, but Mr. Jenkins said I used too much water still” about my art, for example. This horrified the teachers.
When my English teacher, Mr. Ryan, realized I’d mentioned him twice, he pulled me aside. “If you do not remove that entire site, I will get a lawyer, and I will sue you,” he said. I knew, of course, that he had absolutely no right to say that. But oh well. He continued afterwards with more about how he was “sick of those machines anyways,” because Mr. Ryan had always been terrified of the internet from the get-go.
But of course we all realize nowadays that there’s no law against mentioning someone’s last name (or even full name) on the internet or anywhere else. Freedom of speech applies as long as a person isn’t committing slander, and my comments were pretty innocuous. The worst was my complaints about the tests, which were normal kid stuff, really. It wasn’t as if I was describing their license plates.
Mr. Jenkins insisted, in that brief conversation I had with him, that said rights only applied to actual journalists. They didn’t apply to “attention-addicted teenagers.” He literally used that phrasing, which in retrospect was odd for a teacher. I explained very patiently that yes, the point of writing was to be read because it was cool, but again, a blog wasn’t a diary, nor was it just random detritus.
Later in the day, it became apparent that both Jenkins and Ryan had seriously gone off about this to other students, “venting,” as they put it later. I remember walking through the hallway and hearing Ryan spit out “- don’t put me on the internet!” A few kids asked me what was going on, and I shrugged, not wanting to involve anyone else.
My best friend, Greg, was a kind-hearted boy often bullied for his lazy eye. He actually did put his diary online, ironically. I was because of him that I knew of sites like FreeOpenDiary and LiveJournal at that point. He wrote mostly about video games and heavy metal. When, in his class (away from me, I had no idea) the teacher began to rant about what I’d done, he started to write about it, planning to post it online. He ultimately did, and his crowd commented, begging me not to remove my blog on principle. Oh well.
Speaking of principles, though? Eventually, a strange thing happened, and something that puzzles me to this day. I will never know the why or how of this happening, and I consider it completely out of character for my entire school. Nevertheless, around noon, instead of going to lunch, I was accosted by the assistant principal. He pulled me into an empty room, which happened to be one of the ones with a projector and screen, dark and quiet.
I assumed I was about to get another speech about the evils of blogging and steeled myself to keep my mouth shut. I’d already decided my plan of action, and it did not involve further arguments with these people. Instead, though, the principal asked me what the other teachers had said. I told him. He explained that I had to take the blog down “for everyone’s safety,” but didn’t elaborate. I just nodded. He then explained that he would “stop them from screaming at me further about this or doing it in front of other kids.”
I’d never seen an administrator at odds with teachers before. It was surreal!
Anyways, it also kind of unsettled me that none of these teachers discovering my blog saw any merit in it? I’m not saying it was a good blog, more that I got a lot out of it myself. I found blogging, Paint Shop Pro, and especially coding so relaxing, inspiring, gentle and enriching. This was one of the first times I began to notice that rift between people who lived primarily offline lives, and those like me who dive deep into the web. The former seemingly dismissed me entirely whereas the latter always seems like potential friends, so I keep that in mind.
I wonder how the teachers are doing now, when things like Twitter, Tumblr, and countless blogs have changed the world (for better and worse). A lot of that just couldn’t be predicted, though. But really, they ought to have known better, or at least though things through, considered how new technology changes and kids play, etc. Again, it wasn’t as if he was about to be murdered by a monster because the name “Mr. Jenkins” appeared on my site. Yet? That was one of the very reasons he cited for wanting it removed, as if I had that kind of influence and reach.
It was a very bizarre reaction to what felt like a normal part of my growing up, albeit involving the internet. Nowadays, I bet all this would be considered normal, routine social media stuff that teachers deal with. It’s fascinating how culture, and therefore education, changes over time. It’s also interesting how quick educators brought guns to a knife fight, right? I wonder if that’d still be a thing. I do think that ChatGPT could be powered by that awful English teacher, Mr. Ryan crying and throwing up over it, though.
And also? I do do do strongly suspect that if I’d been born as a Calvin (ie, a dude) instead of a Claire (ie, a lady as I am), they’d have chuckled a bit at my neurodivergence or whatever. They would’ve brushed the whole blog out of their mind, possibly first asking me just how I’d managed to pull it off. Some things genuinely are gendered, after all, and a lot of this was. I might not be able to explain that well, but it’s the truth and I know it. Guys just don’t get the “online attention-seeking” accusation regardless of how ostentatious their online presence might be, after all. Again, I don’t quite know why, but it’s a thing.
Looking at a broader picture, I do feel like noting that I believe other disciplinary incidents at the school influenced this. At the time, a group of boys had just been busted for playing poker and betting actual money. Gambling, in other words. They weren’t sure who had turned them in. I’m pretty sure the ringleader of that group had printed my blog out and taken it to Mr. Jenkins in particular, assuming I’d turned them in for playing poker. I hadn’t, being too lazy to do it, but I had known about the poker games.
The girl who turned them in eventually made herself known and there was waves and waves of melodrama that I avoided by hiding in an alcove beneath the stairs. Nobody wanted to mess with me at that point, anyways.
Anyways, here I am, twenty-five years later. I still keep a vast (albeit different) website, as you can see. This one may not be a blog, but it’s pretty intense. I still write to be read primarily rather than for some cathartic or romanticized purpose. Is that attention-seeking? Heck, maybe, but who cares? Writing is fun, keeping a site is fun, meeting people is fun, and I enjoy learning coding. I still see nothing wrong with it, and I don’t think that makes me a hack writer.
I’d definitely say I’ve got a sort of dopamine reaction with the programming aspect of keeping a website, but ironically much less so with any attention it gets me? Still, I like to think that my teachers were right (a bit). Except I won, not changing my internet methods much at all. Did I? Almost feels as if the whole world warped around me to make blogging not only acceptable but necessary in the world…
If you’re curious, after the dressing-down by Jenkins and Ryan, I sure didn’t delete my entire blog. I moved it to someone else’s hosting, and ultimately, a completely new domain with that fearful pigeon theme for some reason. I removed the “Mr. Jenkins” and “Mr. Todd” references with a regex formula, replacing them with Mr. XYZ and Mr. ZYX, something like that. And I just kept going. I changed references to my school to a different name, and removed some obvious ones.
My site actually became a bit more popular as I removed some of my paper sketches and uploaded more Paint Shop Pro. I stopped blogging about my day, too. And I got more responses. After all, truth is, if you really do want attention online, it’s best not to talk about yourself or your daily life. At least, that’s how it was back then. Nowadays, I’m just getting back to web development and I’m not sure. The coding aspect captivates me too much, and I really don’t know if there’s a key for writing to be read now. We’ll see…
This page was last updated on December 17th, 2025.