I’ve been blogging since October 2005. It all started innocently enough: a daily diary of my gameplay time in the online game, World of Warcraft. My memory is so terrible, I thought it would be neat to create a daily account of my time in the game, and ended up creating a whole persona and eventually a following of fans that would follow me from game server to game server as they filled up and got too slow to enjoy playing on. It was an incredible sense of “someone cares about what I’m writing about.”

Traffic got up to over 1,300 unique visitors per day and I was raking in the money with link ads and affiliate sales. Those were the golden years of my blogging life. It’s stalled at 801 posts, even though I still play a few hours per week to relax – I just haven’t taken the time to continue posting my exploits. Financially, I should… those were good days. 😉

Time for a personal site – how about talking about CF?

In May of 2007, while leaving for Chicago for my first blogging conference, SOBCon (no, not that kind of SOB – Successful Online Bloggers), I got onto my host and created my personal blog so I could talk about something other than my digital persona without being weird. It turns out that most of my regular readers actually cared about the person between the chair and keyboard, but it looked strange to me to have a story about Beautiful freaking out about a spider on a site dedicated to a game. It was time to have a personal site. I just wanted to have a place to post everything about my first trip to Chicago for a cool geek conference. A WoW blog was no place to house that sort of content.

Yet cystic fibrosis hardly ever came up. I just did a search of the 445 posts on my personal site, and the phrase “cystic fibrosis” only comes up 13 times in 3 years. I clearly didn’t want to talk about it.

Writing brings validation and reality to a topic

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