The first time I encountered something called blogging was about 20 years ago. Mid-2006. I was into writing so I made a blog on one of the Iranian blogging services, and that's how I started blogging. Traces of those old posts still exist in the internet archive, but honestly, reading my teenage mindset two decades later isn't a very pleasant experience!
The Persian blogosphere (aka Weblogestan), at its peak was a space for many of us to express ourselves through writing, find people like us, talk, and learn.
Later, though, with the arrival of social networks, writing, at least the long-form kind, started to change. When Twitter came along, the main challenge was how to write something worth reading in just 140 characters. Now that question has flipped. A lot of kids today may not be used to long-form writing outside of school. A lot of us are the same way: if something takes more than a few seconds, or a couple of minutes at most, to watch or read, we call it tedious.
Even so, the internet is still full of long, readable content. Platforms like Substack, Medium, and even the long articles published on X show that writing in the old style, though it's declined in volume, still has its own particular audience.
A few weeks ago, when I decided to put together a personal one-page site, the idea of having a blog started tickling my mind. Well, this is the result of that idea.