Just write

For about as long as the Internet has been a thing, I have created things online. My first foray into online publishing was in middle school. There was a group of us geeky kids — all boys if I recall — who would spend the mornings before school and time during lunch in the computer lab. Some people played games. Some people were into programming in BASIC. I, for some reason, was drawn toward creating websites.

The problem I had in middle school, and honestly one that has persisted through today, is that I didn’t know what to make a website about. I knew I wanted to make something, but I was topically inept.

Instead, I focused on playing with HTML, learning about different web design tools, looking for the best CGI scrips to make a scrolling banner at the top of the page, and pretty much goofing off without any much thought toward what the content of the website would be.

In today’s marketing terms, let’s just say I didn’t have a content-first mentality. Unless by content you mean a dope “site under construction” gif.

Even then, I knew that there was something missing. Why make a website if you have nothing to say? Or nothing to sell? But, it was still something to pass the time, and geek out in the process.

Not long ago, on a lark, I decided to scour the Internet archives to see if I could find any of my early websites from that middle school era. I know I had at least one website on Geocities and another on Lycos. But thankfully, the Internet archives have spared the world from remembering the embarrassingly rudimentary things I was making at the time. So much for nostalgia.

I don’t know how many websites I created in that time. It couldn’t have been more than two or three. But, looking back, I can see now the interest that I had and perhaps a bit of foreshadowing to what was to come in my digital life.

But, once I reached high school, things shifted a bit. One summer I went to AtlantaFest, a big Christian music festival that used to take place every year. There, I discovered a new artist who is about my age, and I quite literally fell in love. Or, more accurately, I developed a celebrity crush. Yes, I thought musical artist Rachael Lampa was about the most beautiful and talented person one could ever meet.

Writing this today and thinking back to what I’ll call the short-lived “Rachel Lampa phase” of my life, I realize that there are some potentially interesting stories to unpack in future blog posts. But for today’s purpose, all you need to know is that I thought Rachael Lampa was the bee’s knees and was utterly stunned to learn that she did not have a fan club.

So I started one.

What does any good fan club need? That’s right: a website.

So I finally had something to create online. Or so I thought. I spent a long time designing what I thought was a pretty good looking website for the time. By this time I had started using Microsoft Frontpage to design my site rather than basic HTML, and it looked great! I made a few pages and added some photos. But then I didn’t really know what else to do or to add. Blogging wasn’t really a thing back then, especially for highschoolers. And even if it was, I don’t really know what I would write about on any sort of regular basis.

So, like so many websites of the time, RachaelLampafans.com was mostly a static website. I did get a lot of visits, however. (Or at least that’s what the little green digital people counter I put at the bottom of the homepage told me. That was the late 1990s version of Google analytics.)

And I even found some software I was able to install on my web server that enabled me to offer free email accounts to any visitors. Yes, even you could have your name at rachaellampafans.com as your very own email address instead of a boring Yahoo or Hotmail or (ghasp) AOL email address! This was pre-Gmail, pre-Facebook, pre-Twitter, so giving people a chance to get their own email address with a topic like liked was pretty neat for the time.

In the end, my foray into fan club management went about as far as one might imagine. It wasn’t too long before life moved on and the website fizzled.

As my Rachael Lampa phase drew to a close, my focus online shifted to work. I was still in high school, but I was able to put my basic web design talents into building websites for my job. I made a couple of websites for my Dad’s businesses. I also redesigned our church website, and even went to a conference to learn about the latest in church website trends.

These were all fun and educational projects for me, but they were work. And that’s pretty much what making things on the web has been for me ever since. I like solving problems with digital tools, so these were fun for me.

Flash forward to my current job, where we run an amazing website that is full of rich content. Now we are to a point where I don’t work on the website regularly. There’s a team in place for that who have developed a delightfully technologically complex website that’s full of amazing content. We’re writing TONS of helpful articles, eBooks, video episodes, and more that are all focused on a common goal of helping people find their best senior living options.

But there has still been that voice in my ear saying I should create something of my own. Something that interests me personally.

So here we are.

I’m trying to be super diligent about not focusing too much on the site’s technology or design. Instead, I’ve opted for an out-of-the-box template and a very simple blogging platform.

Even still, I have to keep reminding myself to just write.

Just write.

I’ve started building a list of topics that I think are going to be interesting to write about and, hopefully, interesting for others to read. There’s no central theme or topic to it all — at least that I can surmise at the moment.

Every time I tried to think about a topic (or niche as they call it in the biz), I got instantly bored. I find so many things interesting that I just couldn’t land on one topic.

Maybe that’s SEO suicide, but I don’t think I care. I’m not here for this to become a source of great income; I have a job for that. I’m not here to become some kind of influencer or content marketer, either. I might throw up an Amazon affiliate link here or there, but that’s just really to pay the bills to keep this site running.

In some ways, I have a feeling that this blog will become a bit of a personal journal for me. Ever since I decided to move forward with it, I’ve randomly thought of different topic ideas — things that I want to explore through writing. I’m an enneagram type nine, which mostly means I quite often have no idea how I really feel about something (totally going to be writing about this!). But I think I’m discovering that writing can be a way of organizing my thoughts in a way that helps my true opinion to surface, as hard as that sounds to me (and if I’ll let that actually happen).

So, in a way, I guess this might become some kind of cathartic journal. But I really hope it will also help people in some way. I don’t know if it will, but I hope so, because that means that there’s some good in what I’m doing here. And if there is some good in it, and it is helping people, and there are people waiting for the next post, well maybe that will be motivation for me to keep going. Maybe.

I don’t fully know what this is going to look like. Some posts might be short, and some might be long. Some might be stories with a lesson I’ve learned, and some might just be silly thoughts I’ve had. I guess we’ll see how it works out.

All I have to do is just write. Here we go.

Will you come along with me? Subscribe to this blog so I can notify you when I have a new post. (I promise not to sell your email address or anything shady like that.)