I've had a presence since I was a young kid. I've been very fortunate to be around computers since i was three with these interactions been in school.

Having access to computers was game changing for me and has helped me. I would say I signed up for MySpace when I was ten. I know I am such a rule breaker. When I discovered personal websites, my mind exploded . . . metaphorically.

Curiosity didn't kill the cat

I remember when my parents upgraded from dial-up to DSL. I remember the lady at the phone company explaining all the details of the features included in our internet plan. Something that struck me was the FTP storage space. I thought, "Wait, I can create a my website and have it hosted for free?" This was in 2003 when I started my first personal website. I remember using basic HTML and clip art. I cringe just thinking about it. This was the stepping stone for me building and hosting websites. Using FTP was pretty advanced for an eight year old. I would stay up late just tinkering my site to make it perfect with poor HTML skills. It worked somehow?

Expressing Myself

I've always wanted to find ways to express myself. Since I was big into computers and tech, I figured I would use the website I built to share the things I enjoyed. I wanted to share who I was as a person. I had an idea who I was but I was still developing.

Inspired by others.

I would look at other people who would blog and that would make me super gitty. I remember stumbling upon Matt Mullenweb back in 2003 and being inspired by him. He and many others taught me a lot about blogging. Learning by (browsing the internet) doing.

Being Resourceful.

I would create new websites over the years. I couldn't afford to a pay for a website domain because I was eight years old and I wasn't going to ask my parents to spend money on something when I was more than grateful to have a computer and fast internet. I would use any free service I could until I could pay for it on my own.

Services I'd use

I would use a site in 2010 called Altervista where I officially used Wordpress for the first time. I made a big leap from HTML to the most popular CMS (of course I had no idea at the time). I decided this was the moment I would start expanding from a basic site to start blogging even if the posts had a few sentences. I used:

• Altervista
• DynDNS
• Wordpress.com
• Freewebhosting

Today

Often, I really feel like that 8 year old who was discovering how to build things on the web.