A Brief History of my Blogs (2)

I told you “see you tomorrow,” didn’t I? And I think it’s tomorrow now, thus I complied. I present you the second part of this series of posts regarding the noble history of my blogs.

A rebirth, Nentou Revival

Some time after the creation of Nentou 4th edition, I decided to distance myself from the madness of writing a blog and dedicate myself to the academia. That impulse to study was short lived, with the awful consequence that 2006 was one of the hardest years in my career, as all the assignments that I had on that period of time were difficult, although I was really successful on those which involved software development.

That, together with the fact that my home computer had weird damages on the memory and other stuff, helped put blogging in a corner.

However, something weird was activated on me. In January 2006, just after the start of the new semester, the writing muse spoke to me, justified by the fact that a lot of changes had happened on my way to analyze the University life and the laughable excuse of Information Technology Department it had in that time. In that moment, I launched Tamashii no Nentou Revival.

A simple, no hassle blog, hosted thanks to my friends in Pump Haven,  at http://tamashii.ph-online.net/b/ (in Spanish, excuses for that problem with ImageShack, the theme images were hosted there), Revival tried to speak of more regular, day-to-day stuff, of close experiences I had. That’s why I tried to give it a more editorial approach to my writing. This was, without a doubt, an excellent literary training for me. I learned a lot writing those articles, even if I had a problem with Blogspot that caused my blog to lose about 20 articles, written between February to April 2006.

Second half of 2006 was really hard for me, and forced me to leave the blog in a temporary hiatus, until a small recovery on February 2007 with a series of tests and in May 2007 with more day-to-day articles. I can’t deny that it was really weird to write there after so much time, and even today I check those articles and notice all my grammar and spelling errors I get specially nostalgic.

Nentou Revival ended as its predecessor, in a permanent hiatus, due to my multiple fights with Blogspot and my lack of interest on writing more stuff. I even had a notebook with more than 10 prospective articles that I wanted to post.

That happened, and my interest in writing went to the background, meanwhile my desire to develop software was bigger on each passing day. My experiences with Java and PHP were fundamental for me, so I thought that it wasn’t the right moment to write blog posts, but a sweet time to write source code.

Renouncing to hiatus: A new era

The biggest evolution in my blogging experience occurred when my household got a respectable (for its time) broadband connection. It was the entrypoint of a multi Mbps band connection, and it has been a total success. Now, more than ever I could fill whole hard drives with anime, music and games. I had the access that only some could have, and I could now, without a doubt, stop being a client and become a server (even if that idea is totally ridiculous now).

That’s how I started a new blog. An self-hosted small personal space, named “DreamcaStorage” (in a homage to my favorite videogame console, Sega Dreamcast), totally stored in my computer. I developed it from 0 using PHP, and for storage I used somehow encrypted text files using a trick I found on Internet. Unfortunately, albeit I have the files for each post, I can’t remember how did I encrypted or decrypted them. The software I developed remains a mystery again, as the same with Nentou5 (what I call the fifth edition), I haven’t been able to find them.

This new knowledge of PHP got me started in the development of small apps, including an small system for a Software Lab assignment, a graphical user interface for the Web, a “desktop”, using Javascript and PHP. The project is canned right now, and probably there are better solutions right now, but in that moment when I developed it, it was a complete success.

Knowledge gives more responsibility, that’s why I was very cautious until 2010. I started writing in forums, and not as much on blogs, as well, I figured no-one read them. Going from forum to forum, and thanks to Twitter, I got to know lots of interesting persons, I showed them a bit of my creativity and my ability to find solutions to problems, and receive from them awesome answers to my questions on software, hardware, tech and entertainment.

However, in a given moment in 2010, all my ideas converged: my love for anime and Japanese music, video games and my scarce abilities as a writer. I had seen a lot of anime series on the first half of 2010 (35 in total), it was hard to keep track of them and I couldn’t remember how to recommend some of them to someone. That’s when [anime_rvws] was born.

Stay tuned for the third part of this series, where I’ll talk about my problems starting [anime_rvws] and how I’m still having problems, and how I’ll try to fix them,