Blogging - Taking the red pill

Yikes! I haven't posted in over a month! Where did I go?

I guess you could say I went down the rabbit hole.

I know it's a lame Matrix reference, but that's the only thing that quite describes the last month or so.

I keep my real life off this blog, so I won't go into too much detail. I can say when I started up this blog back in January, it was more of toy than a serious venture.

Now it has proven to be a gateway to much larger things...and a window on to what is really going on with the Internet.

I've been using the web since the mid-90s, before I even had my own computer. I remember how clever I though I was when I coded my first crude HTML page.

I knew a little about the programing, search engines, graphic design, etc. Enough that I managed to create web pages and use the Internet for my own needs. I read blogs, used E-commerce sites, and bought stuff on Ebay. I used the net and I thought I knew how it worked. I considered myself an expert.

Since starting this blog, I realize that my self-confidence was a joke. The online world I used for commerce and recreation was filled with strange interworkings that I has scarcely explored. I knew about things...but rarely used them for my own purposes. Blogging was one such thing.

Over the last few months, I have researched topics such as blogs and the blog culture, search engines, social bookmarking, and CSS. Now I have found that ther are countless ways I can use these tools to expand my creativity.

Many of these tools have been around for years. but only now have I really immersed myself in it and started to use them.

This experience is both amazing and disturbing. I'm disappointed in myself that I haven't seized on these opportunities sooner. Like Keanu, I feel a little lightheaded after waking up and wiping the goo out of my eyes. I now realize where I am and what is going on.

The difference is for me, the machines are on my side.

Whoa.