My Online Journeys

From observer to author

I started using the Internet when Yahoo's directory was the major search engine and nobody heard anything about Google (Sergey Brin and Larry Page included). It was fun but not the best user experience. As I remember, my main occupation was to open an e-mail account (still working, although I was locked out of it for a few years) and read as many jokes as possible.

Then I got a job where a lot of data was needed. Well, not just a lot of data but fresh data as well. My library couldn't provide that. I already had a modem to connect to the Internet but it was slow, line has often broken, and pretty expensive. So I started using my library's access to the Internet (limited to one hour per day) to hoard loads of data which was then sorted and edited at home. Only after that, I could write an article.



This situation thought me to become resourceful, efficient, and disciplined.

A decade passed before I finally became a proud owner of my own connection with an optical cable.

First consequence: I went online 24/7.

Second consequence: I wasn't so efficient and disciplined anymore. Why bother? All needed data was available all the time and if I waited a while it may even become a bit fresher.

After that, I put my first website online. It was initially a store with all my books but I decided to publish a lot of my articles from magazines as well. They could bring me money from ads and they also served as examples of my work if anybody wanted to hire me. (And some of them did.)

I will not share the address of my website yet.

Because this was still not the real beginning of my journey. Setting up a website is like printing a business card. Or putting up a jumbo poster. It's still a one-way flow of information, using just a fraction of the Internet potential.

But my website triggered the real thing. See, as a majority of website owners I was very (VERY!) disappointed with my traffic, With more than forty articles I got only a visitor or two per day.

So I started learning about the reasons for my misery.

I learned about the importance of the title of the article. I learned about keywords. And I learned about the promotion of the website.



Yes, I was wrong. I believed a website itself is a promotion but it panned out it could only become such when it is properly promoted.

One of the first tips on promotion was to set up a blog. And I did that on in those days pretty famous service called blog.com.

I decided to write about the subject which was the most familiar to me: fairy tales. I chose the name of the blog ​The Fairy Tales​ (Fary Tales was already taken and abandoned for several years).





After a few articles, I learned another truth: the blog, set for promotion of my website needed a promotion for itself too!

I already knew that much that there were at least two options for promoting: setting up a new blog (and running in circles forever) or reading a few other blogs where I could also make a comment. I picked the latter.

My sincere, original, although not in very good English written comments were welcomed and a few bloggers linked their posts with mine and somebody also mention guest posting.

Then blog.com stopped working.

At first, it just looked like there are some technical issues to be overcome yet the service eventually collapsed.

I could write more but this post is already very long, so I will only make a final point:

My first blog was not a success but it could be. Unfortunately, the free blogging service didn't last as long as I hoped and all my work (a few years!) was gone.





Well, not completely gone. I had a backup. And I decided to put all the data online on another service.

Here it is:

​Fairy Lore​

As you can see, the structure of the blog is pretty simple: once in a while I publish a few interesting tidbits about a specific fairy tale and such a post is followed by something related to fairy tales but not a specific fairy tale (famous illustrator, some symbolism, theory, ...).

And it's still alive, ready to be read.

To be continued!