1. The person you can thank (or curse) for my plunge in the blogging world is Aashish. That’s a different thing, that I have visited his blog may be 4 times in my entire bloglife. Even he doesn’t know that he was indirectly the one who made me take the decision. I was toying with the idea of blogging since quite some time but never really took the plunge coz I thot I would not be able to manage it regularly with the kind of hectic schedules that office usually gives me. (wasn’t wrong about that one :P) Now I knew somewhat about Aashish, since one of his collegemates (P) happens to be my cubicle mate. P would time and again tell me of the mails on their yahoo group that Aashish would usually post.. all gossipy stuff like ppl eloping and getting married and the like :-).. It seems he was the only regular ‘news reporter’ on their yahoo gp. I could perfectly identify with him coz I was more or less in the same situ..trying to keep a yahoo group alive by posting juicy gossip and of course also being the moderator. I was also given to understand that he’s in the IT industry, though I think in the management cadre. And one fine day P told me about Aashish’s venture into the blogging world.. so here I was…thinking that his interests seem to be very much like mine.. and may be I should also give blogging a try.
2. I started my blog as a private blog coz I was not too sure about what to write..I was sure that I didn’t want this to be a personal diary thing. It stayed that way for some days and then I posted something finally. I also made my blog public. But by that time, my blog was nowhere in the latest blogs entries so I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t get any visitors/comments on the first post. It was something of a rather selfconscious first effort :P.
3. I thought of keeping a unique and original psuedonym for my blog. Suddenly ‘twilight’ bubbled up from somewhere in my head. I have always noticed that it’s much easier for people to open up or confess when it’s night or rather when it’s dark. Somehow the sense of anonymity that the night (or rather the darkness) lends to the atmosphere, makes people shed all their inhibitions and share their utmost personal thoughts. I have seen people, even strangers talking their hearts out in situs like these..I have myself experienced the same sense of comfort when it’s night. Ever noticed how one tends to always stay up late talking into the night even when one knows that one has important business to attend to in the morn? Well, somehow it’s just not the same in the daytime. Things are way too clear, precise and visible in daytime. In the night everything is kinda hidden in shadows..and well..there’s a comfortable sense of security. So ‘twilight’ indicated that it’s time to be chatty. I really don’t remember how I thought up of fairy. It was something to do with the magic that night brings with it or maybe it was something to do with weaving magic with words. 😛
4. So much for my originality! One fine day (inspired by many fellow bloggers), I searched in google for my psuedonym. The fact that the number of results were *huge* did nothing to amuse me, because all that turned up in the name of my blog was some obscure comment that I had left on someone’s blog which was in turn cached by google. The rest of the links were about some easily procurable *toy*, commonly found in departmental stores! Twilight fairy was a collectable like Barbie!!
5. Till date I have communicated with 3 bloggers on mail. None of them on a regular basis.
6. No one in my family knows that I blog and I intend to keep it that way. But I have consciously tried to post rather impersonal things so that I don’t land up in trouble at some later date :-). AFA my friend circle goes, I must have told around only 15-20 people that I blog. Hardly 2-3 visit my page once in a blue moon. The traffic usually consists of netizens I don’t know anything about. The number of ppl I shared this with is quite less actually but I didn’t broadcast it to all my friends because I was sure I would be greeted by remarks like ‘You sure are vela’, ‘Oh, so that’s what keeps you busy’, ‘You sure have a lot of spare time’ and the like.
7. My stats counter shows me some very weird things. I have never set my timezone but it gives me varied results all the time! It has a timezone wise share of my visitors. Bewildered would be a small term..to describe what I was when I saw that most of my visitors seemed to be from the middle east.. Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and even Pakistan. A substantial number was from India but it was miniscule compared to the middle east visitors! I wonder why ppl *there* would be reading my blog more than Indians! Though it also showed some stats of US (both east coast and west coast, where typically Indians work). In between for some days the stats showed that there were *hardly* any Indian visitors. I think most visitors ignore their timezone settings. That could be the only thing that explains the goof up. Here’s a pic of the stats.
For current stats, you can click here.
