Blogger, Since 2002

I’ve been blogging for 10 years.

Yesterday (September 4) marked the 10th anniversary of this blog — here’s the very first post. I’ve been writing on the web for longer than that though.

Soon after I moved to Japan, I decided I wanted to develop a personal project that would somehow keep me in contact with friends from back home, and that would tie into arts and culture. I ended up starting the site with a friend of mine, Guy Bourgeois, and we called it Acadiespatiale.com (no, it doesn’t exist anymore). The idea was to produce a site that would promote new Acadian culture — I’m an Acadian, meaning a French Canadian from the Maritimes (Canadian east coast), different from French Canadians in Quebec. I learned HTML and designed a site, and then we invited people we knew or admired to write columns, contribute art and texts, and more. I took up the challenge of writing a weekly column about my adventures in Japan, which I wrote in French — it was initially called “Johnny Sushi,” and after a couple of years, when I moved to Canada for a year, I changed it to “Subbacultcha” (after the Pixies song).

On September 5, 2002, after a great 4-year run, we decided to end the site, but that would of course not mark the end of my online musings. I’d taken a liking to writing regularly on the web, and earlier that year I’d launched my own site, jeansnow.net, where I wrote other things and shared photos. The reason I consider the start of my “blog” to be on the date I mentioned earlier is because that’s the day that I decided to try using this fancy new service called Blogger, that promised to make updating a site much easier — yup, I was pretty much a blogger since the very beginning.

The site later moved over to Movable Type, and then to WordPress (when MT started charging for its software), and that’s what I continue to use to this day.

How did that translate into working as a writer? Read on tomorrow.