Six Years

That's how long I've been blogging. I started Cyber Chocolate over on AOL, back when AOL had its J-Land. They called their blogs "journals" and they were still relatively new when I decided to try them out. They were so limiting in design and what you could post, but they were easy to set up and use. So in early March 2004, I set up a few AOL journals. And I Googled subjects I was interested + "blogs" and found many fun blogs to read. Which led me to try some other blogging services that looked interesting, because their blogs were much cooler looking than AOL's.


And not knowing what to do on the other blogging sites, I set up shadow blogs for a couple of my AOL journals, including Cyber Chocolate. I dropped most of them after a few months, but one I kept. The one on blogspot.com.

Oh, Blogspot was difficult to use back then. I couldn't make heads or tales of the templates and had no clue how to customize them. I was just learning basic html codes to use in AOL journal posts. But Google had bought Pyra Labs, creators of Blogspot and I liked Google and figured I'd let things sit for a bit and I ended up being very glad I did. Even if I'd been contemplating dropping the Blogspot Cyber Chocolate by June 2004. After all, I really wasn't using it. Then, Blogspot got the promised redesign and everything changed.

Gone were the banner ads on top. Blogger was a nice, streamlined site with some new, easily customized templates, even if the options were limited. If you knew some html and css, at least enough to maniuplate the existing code, you could do a lot. By then, I knew enough to fiddle and tweak. Blogger became my new playground.

I was loyal to AOL. I kept Cyber Chocolate there as my main blog. But whenever I wanted to post some quiz results that used javascript, not allowed by AOL, I posted it here. By August, I was using this and my other Blogger blogs fairly heavily, double posting nearly everything.

I don't recall when this blog, once called Cyber Chocolate, Jr, became just Cyber Chocolate and the AOL version became the junior edition. And over time, I grew tired of double posting and let it die, finally deleting it, though I don't recall when. By the time AOL got out of the journal business a couple of years ago, I no longer cared. J-Land was a good place for a newbie to start, but Blogger is so easy now, it's just as good for a new blogger. And the Template Designer in draft.blogger.com makes it easier and more customizable than ever.

Six years for this blog in one form or another. It's been quite a ride and I'm still having fun, so here's to the next six years, and all of you who have been reading along the way.


Feeling: accomplished
~~~o0o~~~
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