Thank you, PEx!

Tomorrow, April 15, 2023, will be the last day ONLINE of the best forum website in the early 2000s--- PinoyExchange.com. It will go offline after more than two decades. Here's their announcement via their official Facebook page:

PEx has been THE online community board authority in the early 2000's. Due to its heavy traffic 24/7, I am guessing that it required higher bandwidth to accommodate its growing membership who have been discussing online 24/7... yes, 24/7 since PEx also has thousands of members based overseas (eg. USA, and the rest of the world). Pinoys are also known to be online addicts. So PEx never rested and remained super active during its peak years. My PEx milestones would include the following: 1) consistent Wireless Journal (WJ--- the first before twitter came) post leader (with CiGaWeTte); 2) owned personal threads: one made by mauve_2002 and the other shared with completenonsens; 3) owned a PExPlus Private Journal (the earlier version of a blog); 4) I became a forum moderator for Buhay Pinoy. Personally, I got to be introduced to PExers who eventually turned real-life friends. Up to date, we remain friends beyond cyberspace. And this is one thing I really thank PEx for. Plus I got to be friends with those prominent moderators & admin (Ada, Leigh, uptowngirl, to name a few). Who could have imagined the online life before the social media and tiktok era? Thanks to PinoyExchange.com, we had those intellectual and not-so-intellectual online exchange of ideas on topics as heavy as politics & religion, to as light as Buhay Pinoy and Small Talks. And I can claim, IMO, that PEx was the ONLY authority when we speak about online community forum... even miles ahead of the then Peyups.com.

PExers turned real-life friends: mauve_2002, mckoolit,
HeartBreaker200, BabyFATS, and BadAssGoddess

Thank you, PEx.

My Baby Is Now An Adult

I'm not talking about my kids but this blog just turned 20 years old today. Looking back, there are a lot of memories to look back at for the past two decades. The beauty of this platform is you get to remember things that you may have forgotten had they not been written or documented through a diary, in this case, an online diary. Blogs have evolved from initially being a personal hobby or outlet where you can write what transpired in your life for the day, to being commercialized (monetized) to make it as a way to earn. Then when handy phones became more advanced and video cameras and editing apps became more accessible, most blogs were converted to vlogs (video blogs). This reminds me of Coy who could have been one of the pioneer vloggers who may have been instrumental in its existence if only he's still with us today. He's the one who introduced to me what a vlog is, as early as year 2007. That same year, he's already been encouraging fellow bloggers to try out vlogging. I've stated my thoughts about it more than 15 years back: Pinoy Vlogging In A Personal Blogger's Perspective.

Today I am pondering if I want to revive updating more often. Being aware that this is a public space and unlike 20 years ago, network of people can easily "stalk" you thru many means today, I am having double thoughts of preserving my private life. Since this used to be known only to my closest friends (online and real world), it is a different story today. Like those FB friends you just add as friends but are not actually close to you, most people now can easily access your writings online. Because it is what people has become--- well-versed online. So let's see what is in store next for this blog of mine.

Among the many posts I make here, the year-enders have always been my favorite as it summarizes a year of my life in one long post. And come to think of it, this blog reached two decades already but I only managed to write one "decade-ender" post. It was actually a feat doing it and now I want to give myself a pat on the back for doing it.

My first-ever year-ender blog post, written and posted from Canada.

I miss blogging. I miss my blogger friends--- who were usually my loyal readers, and whose respective blogs I also read in return. Today, some of them I get the chance to communicate with just through social media, either Facebook or Instagram. I miss the old times. If I could bring back a moment captured in my blog, it would be this day: sibling bonding.