Places I've Blogged at Before

Yesterday, I was reading Wikipedia’s list of social networking sites again. I am one of those people who has had an account with far more sites than she actually uses. The only reason I have never had a mySpace account, in fact, is the inaccessible CAPTCHA they at one point at least had. I recently deleted my Hyves account, and still have an active Facebook account that I however rarely use, because I don’t want to get the Google search results for my name up another several thousands just by participating there.

In any case, this got me thinking about all the places I’ve had an online journal, diary or blog at. Now that I notice, I think this makes me a personal information exhibitionist even if I rarely used my full name. Anyway, here is the list:

• Blogger: I was almost going to write that this is the only major blogging site I’ve never had an account with, until I realized that actually I did. I can’t remember when, but probably in like 2005 or 2006, I briefly tried my hand at setting up a blog there. I think what drove me away was a combination of the annoyingly uncustomizable look, the increased risk of Blogger sites for crashing my (and by my reasoning everyone else’s) browser, and, seemingly least but really most importantly, the fact that you can’t backdate your posts.
• Diaryland: Owned several accounts starting in late 2002. Created my main account in September of 2003 and had the precursor to this blog hosted there until February of 2007. The link to that account now automatically redirects here.
• Diary-X: Briefly kept a diary there in 2003, but I can’t remember what dissatisfaction with Diaryland got me to try this. Maybe it wasn’t so much an important dissatisfaction as it was my urge to try out every journaling site around.
• JournalSpace: Posted one entry in 2006. Again, there was something I didn’t like about Diaryland that prompted me to try this site, but its mandatory calendar (something I hate on many WordPress themes, too) and lack of customizability got me to quit.
• LiveJournal: Yes, of course I had an LJ. In fact, I had one public LJ and one “friends-only” LJ in 2005 and 2006. The former included mostly health whines and my latest, insomniacally-inspired nonsense (I guess I’m going to move over there again, given that I’ve been having really bad insomnia lately, LOL). The latter included long, psychological babble that was even worse than what made it onto my then Diaryland page (although “so” didn’t have six o’s there when suffixed by “bad”), and that I really should’ve kept offline. By the way, does anyone have a clue why LJ seems to be experiencing some kind of revival lately? And what the hell necessitated the creation of an LJ-look-alike that requires invitation (but so did LJ back in 2004 or so) by the name of DreamWidth?
• myDiary.nl: My first online diary, started in October of 2002. Kept regularly until March of 2004, when the Diaryland diary took ground, and taken offline in 2005.
• Teen Open Diary: the adolescent, free version of the Open Diary Project, which Wikipedia claims was the first social networking site. Kept a diary there briefly in 2002, mostly enjoying its post “circles” (ie. generic categories). Think it died cause of some 30-day inactivity suspension.
• Web-log.nl: Yes, I also own an account there, although I should really delete it given the number of spam E-mails I get from them. Made two failed attempts at creating political blogs there in 2004 and 2005.
• WordPress: Here. Started in February of 2007.

I did not list “diaries” that were really “personal” forum threads – oh, of course I did briefly own a Wrong Planet “blog” in 2007, I forgot -, or where your posts got mumbled together with everyone else’s (like The Diary Project). And it would not surprise me if there were some I still forgot.