I have a confession to make: I'm a blogaholic. In others words, a blogging addict. After you get done laughing at me (or with me), continue reading to find out why I consider myself one. I can't put it into perspective for you if I don't give you a bit of background history, so here goes.

It all started after I moved to the Philippines in April of 2006, but the roots of it go back even further. I ran a BBS (bulletin board system) on a Commodore 128D for about six years, from 1992 to 1998. I always enjoyed the conversation aspect of it more than anything else. Dropping the BBS was one of the hardest things I ever had to do, but my users had fled in favor of the Internet.

After my arrival in the Philippines, I spent most of my first two months taking care of personal business. Around mid-May of 2006, after letting my laptop gather dust for more than two months (since before leaving the US), I started using prepaid Internet dial-up cards. Those cards were expensive when being used during the daytime, only covering 20 hours each. I quickly learned to restrict myself as much as possible to the nighttime hours that were free. That's when my sleep cycle got screwed up so badly. It was already bad as I was trying to adjust to a radically different time zone. 15 hours difference to be exact.

After messing around with multiple content management systems, I decided to go with a self-hosted WordPress blog near the end of May. I had already checked out blogspot.com and wordpress.com and didn't like the restrictions they had in place. I'd already browsed several blogs and settled on using the WordPress software. I'd taught myself PHP and CSS over the years and I was confident I'd be able to tweak what needed to be tweaked. It was more tweaking than I expected but I think it paid off. Andy Beard gave me pointers along the way.

The first few months were the rocky months of blogging for me. I wasn't concerned about search engine optimization, attracting more readers, or anything like that. I just wanted to put my thoughts down as a journal of experiences. I read a lot of blogs to begin with and read as much as the time on my dial-up cards would allow. I eventually got DSL after my house was built and I moved in, but I still didn't get knee-deep into my own blog until well after the end of the year holidays. That might not have happened at all if it hadn't been for the comments in February of 2007 and both the Reddit and Digg attacks in March. My blog might have continued to languish in obscurity. I blame Paul Hunter, HMTKSteve and Matthew Jabs for my increasing popularity.

Since March, I have spent most of my waking hours reading other blogs, writing on my own blog, and even commenting here and there on other blogs. Since I read mostly via my feed reader (and a lot of that offline due to numerous power outages — thank God for Google Gears), I confess to being a lurker as well. Early on in my blogging history, I developed an affinity for helping other bloggers improve their blogs at the risk of ignoring my own. I'm not quite sure why that happened, but it did. A lot of what I do is behind the scenes. For some odd reason, there are times when I really don't want to draw attention to myself (hard to believe, isn't it?).

Why do I consider myself a blogaholic? I feel ill if I can't get on the net to read or write things related to blogging. I get angry when I'm subjected to power outages and DSL connectivity problems. I feel helpless when I can't help another blogger. Those are the signs of an addiction. Lorna Timbah suggested I was a blogaholic back on July 5th and I agreed with her. If what I write or do has a positive impact on other bloggers, or readers in general, then being a blogaholic can't be a bad thing.

Powerful Post Award - August 27, 2007 Profitable Productive Posts - August 29, 2007