first blog post

Hello, welcome to my first blog post. I found out about Spacehey today on Pinterest, and I am so happy with the way this site works. I've been looking for something like this for a while. My parents used to be on Myspace and Friendster in their mid-20s, which is actually one of my earliest memories from around 2006. I have been on the internet for almost 15 years now, 10% Facebook and 90% Instagram, which I'm sure hasn't been 100% good for my development.

I won't get into the details of my time on Instagram, but the way I used it and the way I observed other people through a social media lens started to feel wrong to me in the past 7 years. When I got to uni I finally tried letting go of it and lying low. But I understand how much of a treasure social media is! For starters, I moved halfway across the world and it became hard to keep in touch with my closest friends without social media. The other reason was that I relied on my Instagram page for sharing my art when I first started posting, which I want to continue to do. Self-expression is something I want to continue using the internet for and I think blogging is a great way to do this.

Before I found this site, I tried using Neocities and WordPress, but there were a lot of issues with formatting. Neocities was fun and I tapped into the little HTML/CSS I remember learning from high school, but it took way too long to set everything up and make it look the way I wanted it to. I took too much time designing and less time actually blogging, since it was completely barebones with very little structure. WordPress was better with a built-in blogging structure, but the designs were premade and free users had limited selection. Then I tried mmm.page and readymag, which were better choices but had a lot of great features behind a paywall, which I don't have the budget for. The only other thing I know of but haven't tried is Canva's website hosting functions. I simply needed creative freedom, affordability, enough structure that it isn't suffocating, and a focus on blogging, which is exactly what this is!

TLDR; I'm glad I found this site! I hope I can share what little I've learned and the things I have created on my blog and fulfill my need for self-expression. That's all!

Extra: A short note on my name -- I chose racehorse because last night while watching The Paper (yes, the sequel to The Office), I let myself draw whatever I wanted and produced a racehorse. I am a big Bojack Horseman fan (not something to be proud of I'm afraid) and the whole plotline with Secretariat did a number on me. I also feel connected to horses, since I was born in the year of the horse. Horses also have something to do with apples, which is what my previous screen names have revolved around.