5 year blogiversary

Five years ago, Hubs wrote our first post.

This blog still is exactly what it started out to be: a glimpse…a place to capture moments…share funny stories and offer another connection point with our friends and family back home.

And since the birth of our child, it is a place for the grandparents to get to know their grandchild.

Here’s how Eastern Journey came to be…

the beginning
Christmas 2003. Unless there has been a flannel shirt damaged at some point throughout the year, Hubs has always been particularly difficult to shop for. He’s into tech. He knows the latest products, just when to buy, where to buy, and if it’s finally the right “generation”.

With Christmas approaching, I thought it might be fun to give him a website. We were thinking about moving to Asia so we wanted a solution to e-mailing gobs and gobs of photos to our friends & family. (Note: this way back in 2003 people! Long before blogs.)

I ended up telling Hubs that I wanted to get him a website for Christmas because I needed his help. I had no clue how to buy a domain or set up a hosting service. To my shock, Hubs thought the gift was fun so he agreed to help me, but I had to determine the name. Our choices were:

easternjourney.com
cultureinfused.com
and one other name I can’t even remember.

(Of course, I had lots of really, really cool names, but they were already taken.)

Finding an open domain name was the hardest part. We consulted several of our friends – including our multi-cultural expert friend that goes by the handle ‘Time’.

At last, we decided that Eastern Journey sounded great and gave us lots of options on where we could end up living…somewhere east sounded about right. Hubs chose one of the better rated hosts of that time, bought the domain name and a basic hosting package.

writing code takes time
Once the domain name was purchased, Hubs began writing HTML (oh, those were the days). I vividly remember him asking me, so what color do want the web page to be? We ended up with this odd shade of blue (which I picked). And lots of random photos each uploaded individually. It was time consuming and consequently didn’t get updated very often. Something needed to change…

blogger enters the scene
During the late Spring of 2004, when we were moving from California to China, Hubs mentioned, “Hey, I put a blog on our website.” And I remember replying, “That’s nice.” We were in the middle of our move & visiting as many people as possible before we left. The last thing on my mind was some strange Blog thing. I didn’t even know what a blog was. (Hey – back in May 2004 did you know what a blog was? My point exactly.)

Hubs had discovered the “web log” (aka. blog) and specifically a service called Blogspot.com by Google. It allowed people to easily updated posts and pictures in a chronological order.

In 2004, we posted a total of 18 times. Like I said, I wasn’t so sure about this blog thing.

4 separate blogger blogs
By 2007,  we had 4 separate blogger blogs hosted on our site. We were going for the “purist” approach so our most popular topics each had their own blog: China, Schäfer, Recipes and Tech. Finally, we decided to integrate them all into one blog with separate categories. Simple is better.

the move to wordpress
After awhile, Hubs and I noticed that Blogspot just didn’t allow us to do the customization that we wanted to in posting. At this time, we discovered one of the major, free blogging services called WordPress and migrated all four of our blogspot blogs to it.

WordPress allowed us to combine the simplicity of frequent posting with the flexibility of different plugins and customizations that are allowed. We *heart* WordPress.

co-posting
Hubs blogged most of 2004 – 2007, but then Schäfer was born and I wanted to update our family on every little thing my new baby did so I started writing too. It wasn’t easy at the beginning to share a blog, but we’re glad we do.

Blogging truly is our hobby as it allows both Hubs and I to collaborate on some topics together. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been in town and one of us has said, “That’s so blogable.” I delete his love of commas and he is my living spell-checker.

Altogether, it results in what you see here today: 1654 Posts

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