Vox Noxi

Full circle: for the love of simple blogging

I’m a little young to be getting wistful about the “good old days,” but since the urge to blog again stirred in me recently I’ve been thinking about the various blogs I’ve kept over the years and wondering when it went from being exciting to the chore it felt like when I just stopped entirely last year.

 My first website was yellow, a soft and inviting pastel that for some reason appealed to me. It was also arduously hand-coded in Notepad, my copy of “Teach Yourself HTML in 7 Days” waiting patiently for me to need help. It was simple, to the point, and with the exception of a few animated GIFs (for which I will probably burn in web design hell) uncluttered.

Somewhere between then and now, some time between HTML, Blogger, Movable Type, WordPress and Vox, I lost sight of the heart of a blog: the actual content. The fancier things got, the more time I spent fussing over my sidebar content, or tweaking a font or css element. When I sat down to “work on my blog” I didn’t produce anything worth reading because my brain was more focused on the container than the product.

Eventually I just felt like I had nothing to say. Anyone who knows me will assure you, that is not the case. (They will also assure you that after a few beers you will wish I had nothing to say.) 

Trying to get settled back in, using WordPress.com, I just couldn’t get myself back into it. Luckily for me as I was re-visiting many of the sites I signed up for and then forgot about, I rediscovered Tumblr and had a delicious “aha!” moment. This is what blogging used to be for me, and it’s what I missed enough to come looking for.

No elaborate extras, no 17 different ways to sort the archives, just me and my text box.