MY BLOG JUST TURNED A YEAR OLD: Happy Birthday!

        I did not realize until several days ago that my humble blog has already turned a year old last April 22, 2011. I could not quite believe that I have been blogging for a little over a year already. A year that has seen me haul out creativity, ideas, and sentiments from my thirty-plus year old soul. 

  

        What is a blog to begin with? For those who are not that familiar with it, a blog is an online personal diary or journal, updated every day (ideally). In other words, it is one’s personal space in the world wide web. Of course, your blog is for the entire world to see, but you alone are the only one who can post on it which is not the case in Facebook, wherein your posts and status updates are instantaneously ran over and trampled upon by your FB friends’ own posts and status updates. In other words, you are the master of your own universe in your blog. My blog though, is not a personal diary or journal.  Instead, I use it as an avenue where I can write about any topic that intrigues and interests me. I have gone also to the extent of featuring individuals with noteworthy achievements. So basically, my blog is a medium where I can simply express all my thoughts and sentiments.

        A couple of events unceremoniously happened around April of 2011, the month that gave birth to my blog.  I was on the brink of losing things that really mattered to me. Everything that I cherished for nearly nine years almost vanished into thin air. Looking back, I could not really establish a correlation between my blog and that tumultuous time of my life, except for coincidence in timing. But definitely, my blog helped me to swerve away from my worries that time. But God is good! I was able to get back on my feet around May that same year.

        Nobody taught me how to create a blog. I simply researched on the internet on how to create one, and stumbled upon a few free blog sites. So one thing has led to another, and found myself creating my blog via blogspot. I surprised myself by how quite quick I was in learning the ropes and ABCs of blogging. This is not to say though, that I did not encounter errors along the way. For every mistake, one lesson was learned (which is applicable to all areas in our lives). So after several weeks of researching and dilly dallying, I finally posted my maiden article – the 39^th Commencement Exercises of World Citi Colleges. On hindsight, I do not write posts directly on my blog’s template. I use Microsoft word first, then copy everything to my blog’s template, make minor corrections on the template itself, upload pictures, then publish my post.

        

        So what motivated me to blog? It is my inner desire to write that drove me to this current passion of mine. Writing allows me to express myself, particularly my ideas and views about a lot of things. And through my blog, I am able to share those with my followers and the rest of the netizens. It gives me a certain kind of fulfillment when I am able to compose an article and get to share it on the internet, for everybody to read, appreciate, take note of, and even criticize. Thus, it cannot get any better than this! Through my blog, I am also able to reach out to people, and affect them through my articles in many different ways.        

         The greatest competitor of any blogger, is not his or her fellow bloggers or their blogs, but Facebook. I know for a fact that people are more into Facebook than subscribing to blogs. So it is a challenge for any blogger to attract more readers and visitors. To solve this issue, I have already signed up on Facebook just last February of this year, after several weeks of indecisiveness. One of the reasons why I created an account is to have a wider audience for my blog. Through FB I am now able to share my blog posts to more people, unlike before when sharing such was limited only to texting those on my mobile phone's contact list. Yes, I do enjoy FB too, with all those crazy photos and status updates!

        

        To conclude this entry, I wish to thank all people who have been a part of this blog – my followers, guests, contributors, readers, and visitors in general. Thank you for being a part of my blog, and being a part of my life too. I hope that you guys will become bloggers too, and experience the joys of blogging.

Belated happy birthday to you my blog!