10 Years of Blogging

Modern Confessional has gotten a spiffy new look to mark my 10th anniversary as a blogger. I started blogging in May 2003 ahead of the release of my first poetry collection, Better To Travel. I had a dedicated website back then and the hosting company sucked. As a matter of fact, everything about the web was fairly sucky 10 years ago. It's staggering how far the world wide web has come in a decade. Anyway... I created this blog after my website had gone down for the fifth or sixth time in the span of a few weeks. I felt like I needed a back-up site in case my website disappeared into the ether. About five or six years into blogging, I realized that a static website was just that – static. So, I aimed the URL of www.collinkelley.com to this blog and never looked back. 

Here's a few sobering thoughts: This blog existed before MySpace went live. This blog existed when it was still owned by Pyra Labs and was being acquired by a little company called Google. The use of the word "blog" was coined only four years before Modern Confessional was created. In 2003, the blogosphere was still mostly a wilderness. My, oh, my how things change.

Social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have diminished the use of the personal blog, but look at any news website or magazine and you will see that blogging is still alive and well, only the desktop has been changed. Tumblr and Pinterest are just simplified blogs. Remember when Twitter first came on the scene and it was called "micro-blogging?"

Since Modern Confessional began, I have published 1,889 posts and the blog averages about 300 pageviews per day. It took years to build a following, but blogging about poetry, spending most of 2008 writing about politics and recapping American Idol (hey, whatever works!) were what finally got Modern Confessional noticed by readers. If you're super bored, you can scroll down the right sidebar to the Archive button and find links to every one of those 1,889 posts.

I met so many poets and writers through this blog. It opened the door to dialogues, friendships, collaborations, and so much more. Sadly, many writers have shut down or abandoned their blogs (I still miss C. Dale Young's Avoiding the Muse blog), but I plan to soldier on. While the majority of my interactions are now at Facebook and Twitter, Modern Confessional is my go-to for rants, shameless self-promotion and being the "front porch" to my online life.

To all of you who have subscribed to Modern Confessional, who still check in, who leave comments – thank you from the bottom of my blogging heart. It's been one hell of a ride. Here's to 10 more years.