I’m already in the middle of Blaugust this month, and then Robert Birming started something called AuguStory. Why not do both, I figured. The idea is simple: write the story of your blog, no template, no fixed questions, then send him a link so he can add you to the list. I loved the idea as soon as I heard about it.

So here’s my AuguStory: how I got into blogging, and what I’ve been doing with it ever since. I’ve been blogging on and off for 22 years now, more pauses and restarts than I can count. But none of that ever stopped me from trying to get back to writing. I’m glad I’m still at it.

My earliest memory of journaling goes back to junior high school. I started writing in it every day, in an actual notebook. It was short-lived, but it was fun while it lasted.

In high school, I always loved to write. I wrote stories and poems, though many of them are probably lost now, saved on old floppy disks that no longer work. One that stands out was a homework assignment, a short story I called The Mystery Runner, about 20 pages long. I’m honestly not sure anymore if I finished it, homework stories being what they were. What I do remember is trying to describe a place that didn’t actually exist, building it out in detail. It was fun and a real challenge.

I graduated in 1994, and after that I tried AOL dial-up and started dabbling online. There were some lost years where I didn’t write much. But then the internet intrigued me; I saw the potential in it, and I took advantage of it, exploring around until I discovered weblogging - that’s what they called it in the beginning, before “blogging” became the word everyone uses now. That’s when I rediscovered my passion for writing again, and I got excited about starting my own blog.

That’s what got me into journaling online. The earliest I can remember was when I tried out LiveJournal, Blogger, and other small blogging platforms (I don’t remember which ones) around 2004. My actual first blog was on Blogger too, deantobias.blogspot.com, but it’s gone now. My second blog is where things really stuck, deanscyberspace.blogspot.com.

I don’t have a single favorite post from back then. I was just excited to be posting anything at all, so here’s my second post from deanscyberspace, April 2004, just me saying good morning to everyone: deanscyberspace.blogspot.com/2004/04/h…. It’s short, but that’s part of the beauty of blogging, you can write as short or as long as you want, whatever the moment calls for.

It’s also a personal post, just a small moment from my day, the kind of thing I don’t write much of anymore. I still bring my own thoughts and personality into what I write now; that hasn’t gone anywhere, but sharing a specific little moment from my actual day like this is different. Reading this back makes me think maybe I should bring a bit of that back too.

In the earliest days, I worried about whether anyone would read my blog at all. I was trying to figure out how to get people to actually find it. Eventually I had between 80 and 150 readers, give or take; I honestly don’t remember the exact number anymore. But at the time, that felt like an exciting moment.

Social media showed up: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, and I got curious and sidetracked. Reposting and reblogging were huge back then, and it was fun to reshare other people’s stuff for a while. That’s really what pulled me away from writing. During that stretch, I was doing mostly microblogging on Tumblr, sharing photos and reblogging things I found interesting.

After Tumblr, I actually started writing again on WordPress, and kept that going until 2022. I was just writing because I wanted to, not for anyone else. Then I toyed with Postcard and Medium for a bit, posting a few things here and there before finally landing on Substack in 2023. Looking back, I guess I almost never really stopped writing, perhaps just short pauses in between. There was always something going on somewhere.

Once I was on Substack, I wrote there for a while, and even explored Beehiiv for a bit early on, just curious if it might be a better fit. But I stuck with Substack.

Then I got laid off in October 2024, and that’s what stopped me. Life got in the way for a long stretch after that, personal things that needed my full attention, and blogging had to wait. I finally settled down around November 2025.

I picked things back up in January 2026. I’d already been drafting most of my posts in Notion for a while by then, and copying them into Substack was still tiring, that’s really what got me looking at other platforms again. I gave Medium and Postcard another look, curious if anything had changed since I first tried them, and tried Feather.so for the first time, it especially caught my eye since it could connect directly to my Notion database. I cross-posted the same content across a few of them to compare, but I kept coming back to Substack, still not entirely sure if anything else was actually better.

So I gave Feather.so a more serious try. But it was unreliable. I remember adding a featured photo to one post, but it just never showed up, even though the image was already in the database. That kind of thing was frustrating. I still had to write everything in Notion first too, so it didn’t stick. And their subscription is expensive. In the end, I only stuck with it for about two or three months before deciding it wasn’t for me.

Substack was great in a lot of ways, but there were things about how they handled things that bothered me too, like the dickover wall they’d throw up before you could even read a post. I wrote more about that here. That was part of what pushed me to keep looking around.

Then I remembered I actually had a micro.blog account from 2022, and started digging into what it could do. I could customize everything exactly how I wanted: run a newsletter, save drafts right there, even build my own version of the editor with the API. I stopped using Notion for drafts altogether; everything lives in micro.blog now. I landed there a few months later, and I’ve been happy ever since.

Looking back, I don’t think what I write about has really shifted that much. Even on Blogger, I wasn’t just writing about tech. I wrote about whatever was on my mind, same as I do today. What’s changed more is the specific things I’ve been drawn to along the way: the environment, food, health, history, and writing itself, all on Substack. That was part of the experiment, seeing which ones I enjoyed writing about most. I even tried politics there for a short time, but that got tiring and tedious fast, so I dropped it.

Even today, I still occasionally write about the same kinds of topics I did cover on Substack, and I’ve picked up some new ones along the way, too: LEGO, movie ratings, watchlists, book progress, home decor once in a while, and even word-definition cards for my Word Nerd Alert posts. But lately, my focus has leaned mostly toward AI and blogging itself. I think that’s because it’s such a hot topic right now.

Since I’m still figuring out what I really want to write about, I try different things to see which ones I actually enjoy most. That’s the journey to finding my voice, and my writing might read a little different depending on when you’re reading it, because of all that.

Writing has always had a hold on me. Even when I turn away from it for a while, I always come back to it. I hope I stick with writing for life. This post alone took a couple of weeks and a lot of revisions to get right, feels fitting, honestly.

If you want the full timeline, every platform, every hiatus, in detail, I put it all together here: The Long Road Here.