This is my response per the August 4th Group project prompt from Krikket => https://nerdgirlthoughts.game.blog/2026/07/23/blaugust-2026-calendar-weekly-prompts-group-projects/
Arguably you are looking at my first blog: (Ubergeek) Kelly’s World, first introduced in April of 2003. I’ve talked about my blogging history in previous Blaugust events, but this time I’ll try to aim a bit more specifically at the when and what of things.
Not a blog: Geocities (1996 – 2003)
My first stable online ‘home’ was a Geocities address. The address was http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Crater/3106/ although that won’t work any longer- Geocities has long been consigned to the history books. I didn’t post regularly and, in structure, the site bore little resemblance to a modern blog. It was straight HTML with no RSS feed and no mechanism for managing the content. But it was a place with my name on it on the internet where I shared my personal thoughts, and in a sense that may count.
Sort of a blog: PHP Nuke (2003 – 2005)
In 2003 I set up my own computer with a DNS name (kgadams.net) and installed PHP-Nuke. This was an actual content management system with real layout controls, and was far more capable of looking and behaving like a blog. I believe it had RSS generation so people could subscribe to my feed. I established the name of my blog as “Kelly’s World” during this era.
Technically I think I could call this era my first real blog with somewhat regular posting and a structure familiar to modern bloggers. But PHP-Nuke itself wasn’t ideal: I never really liked the administrative interface for one thing, although I can’t really remember why. And there were a fair number of bugs and security holes in the PHP-Nuke code itself at the time, things which exposed my small server to intrusions I wasn’t fully prepared to deal with.
I did, however, establish a rough guide for what my blog was about. Simplistically, “Kelly’s World” contains what it says on the tin: things that interest me. So events in my life like vacations or projects around the house, computer and console game reviews, technical articles including a few ‘how to’ guides, and the occasional rant about something that got stuck in my craw.
By definition my blog is hard to categorize: it requires that the reader decide whether things that interest me interest them. I am a fantasy and science fiction fan, a computer technologist, and a follower of science: a ‘geek’ of sorts. But that still doesn’t necessarily help someone decide whether to return to my blog. My hope from the start was that people would learn what kind of person I am and find enough of interest to come back. This rough guideline has persisted through to today.
Blogging: WordPress (2005 – present)
I switched my blog from PHP-Nuke to WordPress in 2005 according to my posts/notes. I don’t recall the process, but however I did it I was able to preserve the older content largely intact. WordPress was; from the start, a better platform for blogging. Editing and creating posts in particular was easier and more enjoyable than with PHP-Nuke, so the change to WordPress was a good one.
There were also tools that worked with WordPress that permitted offline editing as I recall i.e.: I could pull recent posts into a stand-alone app like MarsEdit and create or edit posts without having to use the web-based blog interface. This kind of tooling was a godsend when browsers / web technologies were less responsive and reactive than they are today.
I never established a good habit of regular posting regardless of the tooling at my disposal. But my first blog from 2003 and the blog you are reading today are largely the same: my thoughts, my life, my rants encapsulated in periodic posts here. I’ve spun off gaming (Words of the AgingGamer) and motorcycle (Geek on a Harley) related content into separate blogs. And I added the word “Ubergeek” in front of “Kelly’s World” to make the blog a bit easier to find on Google. But mostly I hope that there is enough here in my lonely outpost on the internet to make returning occasionally worthwhile for a few people.
** header image is AI generated using ChatGPT