Birth of a Blog

This week's spin cycle is on Births. Since I am not a parent, I don't have any memorable birthing moments— neither do I remember my own birth (sadly my first memory is giving up my pacifier). So, instead I will post on the birth of my blog. I always find it interesting to know how someone's blog came to be. I remember others doing this type of post and was inspired to do so as well. The following is a post that I wrote in May of 2009— a week before my one year Blogiversary:

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Birth of a Blog 01: Seeds of Change

I have always had some sort of personal philosophy. I found it to be rather unique and quite profound and felt that I should write a book. However, my writing is typically short and never of any great length. I felt that I should at least write everything down so that when the time came I can sit down with an editor and flesh out my book. I find that I have so many ideas and never have the writing skills necessary to put it in writing.

Since I was already a letter writer— I tried my hand at writing people and thinking that those letters would be the way that I could get these ideas put on paper. The problem with this method is that letters typically use some sort of correspondence and you tend to write a lot of little things and never focus on any one topic. I longed for those types of correspondences you hear about where two people write to each other for years— however I never knew anybody who was a letter writer even when I used e-mail and they didn't have to worry about finding a stamp.

I learned about blogs at an informal demonstration at work several years back. At the time I felt that it was a good educational tool that enables participants to engage in discussions about a given topic— but never thought that I would be using it myself.

Sometime last year I was pondering getting my own Web site so that I could demonstrate some of my Web development skills and be able to reference it in a resume. After viewing some co-worker's sites to see how they set up a Web site, I noticed that some of them had a blog associated with them. If anything I wanted to have some content to my Web site— so I figured I would start out by blogging a few things then later transfer those pages over to my site when I finally bought a domain.

I found it difficult to find a domain using my name without being excessively long and difficult to remember because "chrisjohnson" as well as "christopherjohnson" were already taken. I figured I would try shortening it to be easier to remember and chose my first two initials and the first three letters of my last name— thus Ca-Joh was born.

If you are interested in "The rest of the story", you can read my other posts as well:

• Birth of a Blog 02: Starting Out
• Birth of a Blog 03: Growing Pains
• Birth of a Blog 04: What's to come
• Blogiversary

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