Twelve years ago, having decided to abandon my old Diaryland journal, I came across a list of weblogs in someone’s Pitas (remember Diaryland‘s supposedly cooler sister Pitas?). After visiting a bunch of them, I decided that I wanted to have one of my own so I could share all the cool stuff I found in my web meanderings, of which I did a lot because I had no life.

After researching tonnes of free web space providers, I dubbed Freespeech.org the winner. Free web space with no ads! Perfect! So I signed up for an account, set Blogger to post via FTP to it (Blogspot hadn’t existed yet) and voila! A new weblog was born. I named it Weblog Wannabe because I wasn’t really sure what a weblog really was but really wanted it to be a weblog. Not the most creative name ever but I thought it was catchy.

My first month of blogging is so full of name-dropping.

My second month of blogging is even more so with some bad pseudo-poetry written for other webloggers thrown in for good measure.

My third month of blogging… My god, people actually read this CRAP?!?

I think a lot of people used to visit my weblog only because they felt sorry for this poor Indonesian girl with no life. It’s the only logical explanation I could think of for the hundreds of visits I used to get daily. But thanks to my readers’ compassion and their generous offers of friendship, I managed to survive some of the toughest times of my life. It’s too bad that I no longer have most of the readers I used to have because I really want all of them to know how much their emails and comments meant to me. They meant a lot. They helped keeping me going.

And then along came Troy, the nerd with whom I ended up tying the knot. He wouldn’t have found me if he hadn’t been a reader of zannah’s blog and zannah hadn’t been friends with Bryan and Bryan hadn’t posted a link to my wee blog on his. But he was and they were and he did, and so he found my weblog several months after I started blogging and became a regular. The next year, he sent me a friendly email and we started chatting on ICQ and we continued to do so almost every day. I’m pretty sure he thought I was a psycho several chats in but he stuck around anyway. For years. Even after I pissed him off countless of times with my stubbornness. A man after my own heart. :)

TL;DR, we eventually met in 4D in 2004 and his first impression of me was that I was stinky. True story.

I can’t even begin to tell you how glad I am to have started this thing 12 years ago. It has improved and enriched my life in so many ways. Thanks, ye olde blog, for allowing me to meet so many interesting, kind, and generous people from all over the world and most importantly, for sending me a top-notch husband. You rock! Happy 12!