My Blogging Backstory

I was drafting a post and I thought it would be good if I gave some background on myself, specifically my experience blogging.

Once upon a time I was a news writer for the California Patriot magazine. It is the conservative political student publication at the University of California, Berkeley. I started my sophomore year of college. My column in the monthly magazine was about the student government, the ASUC. After a few months, I was asked to consider writing for the magazine's blog as well. My only blog experience was occasionally reading a friend's Xanga or LiveJournal and irregularly viewing one or two blogs people had mentioned to me.

In early 2006, I started blogging. It was a Wordpress blog hosted on a third party server. I was one of four bloggers for the site. At first I wrote about the ASUC like I did for the print edition of the magazine. Reading the other posts on the blog, mostly by the Online Editor Patrick Rodriguez, I looked to the same places he did to get ideas. This was commenting on what happened on Sproul (the big student plaza where everything happened) or an article in one of the local newspapers. Considering I spent more time on Sproul than I did in class that year, I saw all the protests and crazy things that happened.

One time one of the protests (and counter-protests) I covered was mentioned and linked to by Michelle Malkin's blog. Since this is a nationally known and well read blog, this link was a big deal.

The Patriot's blog won honorable mention in the Daily Cal's Best of Berkeley: Best Blog category. However, the winner in the category, Berkeley LiveJournal community, was a message board and hardly a blog. I won the Patriot of the Year award for outstanding contributions to the magazine for the 2005-06 year.

The busiest times of blogging were around the student elections. Since I had closely followed the student government's actions through the year, I knew a lot of background information. When anyone running for office makes grand claims, it is always fun to throw their own record back at them along with a few questions.

After Patrick's graduation in January of 2007, I became the Online Editor. I got the job because I was the most consistent and dedicated blogger. As part of the job I was the webmaster for the magazine's website. At the start of 2008, the Patriot blog was named as a finalist in a national competition for the best conservative or libertarian campus blog.

The most fun thing to cover was the tree sits. Hippies would climb trees and give a list of demands. If these demands were not addressed, they would stay in the trees. While this happened, there were great pictures to be had and unique people to watch. The sit in the oaks by Memorial Stadium lasted over a year.

In my two and a half years of blogging for the Patriot I made over 130 blog posts, many of which had pictures I took myself. Many of the posts were commenting about things politically and reporting on things I saw around campus and the city. I also had a few good bloggers nearby who I learned some things from.

After graduation, I wanted to continue blogging, but had trouble coming up with a presentation I was happy with. Eventually I started this blog. The archives on the right can fill you in on what I have written in the last year.

I could write a book about my blogging and all the campus and political things it touched on. Until that happens, I will keep posting here.