I had been meaning to write this post for a while now but I haven’t had the time until now. What triggered this post was another post I read by Jim Borden, a blogger extraordinaire! Anyway he wrote a post called “The Fascinating Wayback Machine AKA The Internet Archive” and the post is about a site which lets you see what your website used to look like when you first started blogging. I would highly recommend checking out his post which is super interesting and amusing! I was super fascinated so of course had to try it out and it was honestly such a blast from the past. I had so much fun viewing my old posts and looking at what my site used to look like.
I honestly can not believe how much my site has changed since back then. I’m planning on doing a full post about the changes I’ve made to lifesfinewhine over the years and how I made these changes, what plan I used to use and which one I’m currently using and basically all the details of how I made my blog look the way it does but this is kind of the very short version of that.
I had less than a thousand followers back then and to be honest I did not blog very regularly because I was still in High School at the time. I would pretty much just blog whenever I had the time and it was usually once a week. My first real post went up in August 2015 and it had to do with the psychology behind cults and why people join cults. I decided to write on this because we were learning about it in my psychology class and this blog was originally supposed to be only about psychology (oh, did I move away from that lol😂). In my first year I only posted about 40 posts and I was so excited by any notification I got that I kept refreshing my WP to see if anyone had commented! The whole site just look is so much different and so much less personal than it does now. The image you see below was pretty much it- it just said lifesfinewhine and THAT’S IT!
I also started to do some art back then and found this post called “Art!” in which I shared some of my first art works with you guys. I’m not sure why I didn’t share the rest but I did a lot more charcoal art and other art after this. I drew the characters from Family Guy and I did a charcoal painting of Rupert- Stewie’s teddy bear. I wish I could share the pictures but they’re in Kenya. It was so fun to see the art again because I had genuinely forgotten about it and don’t currently do any art anymore.
Early on I knew that blogging was going to become a thing for me and that I already felt that there was something special about it but I just did not know how to include it into the schedule I had at the time because I was a full-time high school student. But my friends were super duper enthusiastic and supportive and they were honestly what pushed me to keep blogging even when I didn’t particularly have the energy to which I am forever grateful for. I was also doing a lot of other writing on other platforms at the time which is why I did not spend too much time on WP. This is me being super excited about hitting 500 followers!
Anyway I had this very different looking blog with a handful of followers which I worked on for years till I finally reached 10k followers in August of 2019- almost exactly five years after I started. At this point I upgraded my plan and gave my site a makeover which for a while I absolutely loved.
However, the theme was a bit slow in loading and there were some other aspects to it I did not like. So, when lockdown began I decided to give lifesfinewhine another makeover I tried to make the site more SEO friendly. I also finally found the perfect theme for me and customized it so that it looks like exactly what I want my site to look like.
Okay, I got carried away and forgot to tell you guys the story so without any further distractions here it goes. I always found the tags/challenges really fun to do. I thought they were such a great way to get to know people better and to just sort of I guess play a sort of virtual game with your fellow bloggers. So, I used to frequently participate in these sort of things and I did this one tag/challenge called “Strike Out” and I got a couple of comments but I got this one super mean comment and that was the first time I ever got like a really negative comment and it kind of freaked me out and I did not even know how to respond or if I should even respond. I think I messaged my friend and asked her how I should deal with it and asked another blogger who I was good friends at the time with about it too. I think your first negative comment just kind of hits the hardest so I was kind of in shock and disbelief and it did not help that I already had really bad anxiety and mental health problems at this time.
I did end up responding to it and turns out the blogger who left the negative comment didn’t have a problem with my blog he just for some reason really hated that one post because he left okay-ish comments on others posts after that. It was so weird to me but not I’m not anxious about it anymore and kind of find it hilarious that someone would leave a comment like that and not realise that they could simply just not read the post and move on with their life… Anyway, that was my story about my first negative comment. I had actually completely forgotten about this until I saw the Strike Out post on the wayback machine and everything came back to me.
I hope you enjoyed that little throwback! I know this post was kind of everywhere but it’s just because I was super excited to share this throwback stuff with you guys. Have you tried to put your site through the Wayback Machine? If so were you kind of surprised to see how much your site has changed? Has you site changed since you first started blogging? Have you ever received a negative comment on WordPress? How did you deal with the negative comment? Did it shock you and did you respond in any way? Are you surprised by how much my site has changed or have you been one of my followers from back in the day so you know what it looked like?Let me know in the comments below because I would love to hear what you guys have to say!
For Jim Borden’s post click here. To try out the Wayback Machine click here.
For similar posts click here.
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Gonna take a look at the Strike Out tag now! It looks super fun!
Okay, awesome!