How This Blog Started 20 Years Ago

The room turns dark. A loud thud signals the electricity cutting out and the UPS, the uninterruptible power supply, kicking in. The computer is now running on a big back-up battery, until either the blackout ends or the generator kicks in and the lights come back on. Often these disruptions also break the internet connection.

I walk over and pick up the phone, listening for the dial tone. Will there be nothing? A strange whooshing sound? Or the faint, dying echo of the dial tone disappearing into static? Today it’s the latter. The house lights come back on but nothing is coming through on e-mail or internet browser.

If I had written in 2004 the way I write today, then this blog would’ve been full of entries like that. I was living in Delhi, passing my days in a large farmhouse on the southern edge of the city. I took one of the rooms as a home studio. Light marble floors. While walls. A high, vaulted wooden ceiling. One whole side of the room full of wooden cupboards. A large window looking out over the backyard. Monkeys sometimes perched on the sill to look in.

At first that room was pretty sparse. Two small desks. One with an iMac and a printer, the other covered in papers and books. Relics of the PhD programme I had quit. Against the back wall, some guitars and amplifiers, microphones, and a multitrack recorder. Hints at the direction my life was taking.

It was there that this blog began.

Why A Blog?

It wasn’t my first attempt at blogging. I’d encountered blogs and met people who had them back in the late 90s. One major inspiration was Greg Restall. He’s now Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of Philosophy at St Andrews University. But back then he was an up and coming academic using a blog to highlight his recent writing and work. Another was Hugh MacLeod, of GapingVoid fame, who was using his blog to share art and insights into culture.

I’d been building simple websites since 1996. Blogs, with their ability to be frequently and easily updated, felt like the natural next evolution. The perfect platform for authentic personal communication.

I loved the idea that anyone could have a presence online. You could put your thoughts and feelings out into the world with no need for publishers or music labels or gallery owners. I saw blogs in particular as a vehicle for creative freedom. Hugh MacLeod called it being a “global micro brand.”

More than that, blogging felt morally right. Behind all that gatekeeping we were trying to break free from were many stories of stifled creativity and outright abuse. There were so many voices that needed to be heard precisely because they had been silenced. So many people sitting comfortably in positions of power who ought to feel less sure of themselves. Blogs had the potential to change the power balance in many fields.

Why WordPress?

I tried Blogger, but I didn’t like how everyone’s blogs looked the same. Blogging needed a rebellious and individualistic edge. The self-expression had to extend beyond the words. I wanted to own the whole thing. The look. The feel. And most importantly, the url.

So I had a go at hand-coding my own blog-like sites. But people said those were not “real blogs” because a “real blog” used an automated system that added date stamps to posts. So building something from scratch was out of the question. The first compromise to my creative freedom.

If I was to use someone else’s tool then I first had to find it. It had to be something I could customise and control.

WordPress was new, having been around for a little over a year when I first downloaded it. It wasn’t easy to set up. There were no step-by-step YouTube videos to show you the way. You had to manually FTP files into place. Create a MySQL Database. Change code in several files. None of which worked the first time. Simple changes would mysteriously crash your site. Themes were unreliable. Technical explanations, if any, were written by people fluent in technical language and for other people who lived and breathed technicalese. It was hard.

But at that moment I needed a challenge.

Life in 2004, Part I

Starting this blog was an act of desperation. The problems had begun almost a year earlier when I quit my PhD. I had been doing research in Philosophy (The Hermeneutics of Postmodern Ethics) at the Centre for Theology, Religion, and Culture at King’s College London.

It all sounds so grand now. But I wasn’t a great student. I had good ideas. Read voluminously, three or four books a week. Produced reams of notes. But was chaotically disorganised. Unable to manage my calendar. Prone to debilitating bouts of self-doubt and anxiety, although I didn’t understand it at the time. This meant my progress in the ways that count – chapters and papers, reviews, research funding applications – was inconsistent.

To make matters worse, I took time off when my child was born to be a stay-at-home parent, then agreed to relocate as a family to India to support my wife’s career. While those were the right decisions at the time, they slowed my progress on the PhD even more.

I quit because I was running out of time. I wasn’t progressing. And I didn’t want to take more money out of the family’s finances for what felt like a failing project.

I thought making that hard decision would take a weight off my shoulders. I could focus on my family while figuring out what to do next. But life didn’t get easier.

Life In 2004, Part II

Sometimes I hear people say they wish they could just wake up and not have to work. It sounds idyllic. To be free of obligations. Able to choose what you want to do every day. Or do nothing at all.

For the first half of 2004 that’s what my life was like. And it was horrible.

As a “trailing spouse” I couldn’t work once I had quit the PhD. The visa rules didn’t allow for that. Thankfully, my wife’s job came with generous terms that meant we could live well. I had mornings to myself once our kid started pre-school.

It looked like freedom. But I was lost.

I fell into a depression, although I didn’t understand it as such at the time. I started putting on weight. And feeling ashamed because of it. I begged friends and family to come and visit. Then shook with confused rage when they refused.

Finally my body gave up.

I don’t know what it was I ate, but I came down with hepatitis. There’s a period of about three months I don’t remember. I guess I got better. I would wake to take my daughter to preschool. Come home to sleep. Pick her up and play in the afternoons. And collapse in a tired heap in front the of TV at night to watch box sets of Buffy The Vampire Slayer or The Sopranos.

One day friends invited me to go play golf. I struggled my way around the course. That was a wake-up call. I started to exercise more. To walk and swim every day. I stopped having a second sleep in the morning. On the days I felt OK I would go into the studio room to make music. I started to imagine a future for myself and look for things to do with my time.

Why I Blogged The Way I Did

In between the power failures and internet outages I would work on setting up the site. It took a couple of weeks to get it working. The first post went out on 19 October 2004. I would add seven more posts that month. Now, twenty years later, this is the 2,261st post.

I had no hopes or expectations. The internet was different back then. There was no monetisation. No influencers or creator economy. Most people I knew in real life thought blogging was weird. Heck, they thought the internet was weird. A strange obsession that would soon fade into obscurity. Like CB radio. Or collecting Cabbage Patch dolls.

I would open up the WordPress editor window and type away. Sometimes only a few lines. Often the internet would crash and I’d lose everything I’d written that day.

Many of those early posts were so short. Sometimes they were little more than a link to a news story or another blog. I posted so often. Sometimes several times a day. There was no plan. No strategy. Just words going out in the hope someone would read them.

And those words, the act of writing them, and the people who eventually read them, would define my life for the next twenty years.

This is part one of a four-part series. For the rest of this month I will be reflecting on twenty years of blogging here at fernandogros.com