Back in 2002 I had a blog, back when blogs were still kind of new and most people that had them were technically oriented because you had to be to make the internet work. This was before WordPress came along and Blogger was bought by Google in 2003 and gave power to millions of web unsavvy people to make comments with as many animated smiley faces in a row as they pleased. Back when people who wore shirts with code jokes on them were considered outliers.

When I told my friends I had a blog they asked “What is it for?”, to which I replied “It’s for reading! You should read it!”, to which they replied in turn “But aren’t the only people who read blogs, people who have blogs themselves?”. I guess that might have been true at the time, but today everybody and their mother has a blog. Now, people who DON’T read blogs are the outliers. According to Wikipedia’s article on blogging, it became mainstream in 2004. I gave up blogging for the first time in 2003.

Enter Phase II of my blogging career.

I recently quit my agency job to take a stab at freelancing. I wanted to explore lots of things that having an 8-6 job didn’t allow time wise, and generally wanted to try something new. So I formed the Bureau of Betterment as a front for all my efforts (design and otherwise). A part of those efforts is Et Cetera, A Blog, where I will work on becoming a content publisher rather than just a content consumer.

This is a place for me to practice things I’d like to become better at, share things I think are interesting, and keep people up-to-date on projects I am working on. I hope you will participate, because that is what the internet is good for.