THE FIRST (FIRST EVER!) BLOG or My Journey Through Early Web Adventures That Shaped My Future

Last time, I shared the beginnings of my journey and how I met someone who inspired me to be curious. It’s incredible how experimenting with free websites and forums taught me skills that would shape my future in web development and digital design. In this post, I’m sharing the story of my first attempts at building something meaningful online and the unplanned path that unfolded, from learning Photoshop tutorials to creating my own “professional” blog.

Does anyone still remember free websites? Hostinger . often advertises itself as one of the first and most popular free hosting providers, but there were also sites like vhost.lt, blogas.lt, and a few others on the Lithuanian market.

In exchange for displaying ads on your blog, you’d get a subdomain, like fantomas.vhost.lt, and you could install nearly anything you wanted to create your website, blog, or even a forum.

To be honest, I probably tried them all. Beyond those early attempts to click reCAPTCHA for two cents a click (paid to PayPal), I also created forums, websites, and blogs. Somehow, blogs stuck with me.

I remember my first attempt at making a website involved bare HTML code. I would rewrite articles and puzzles from books, encyclopedias, or children’s magazines: jokes, riddles, exciting facts, and fun trivia. And believe me, back then, nobody was thinking about responsive design!

So, what to do once you have created this content? You had to promote it. I was that classic spammer, joining forums, posting links, and “inviting” people to visit and discover something “new.” There were better ways, of course, like link exchanges or dedicated sections on forums where you could share your posts—and you wouldn’t even get banned for it!

Speaking of nostalgia, does anyone remember the days before Google Analytics? Back then, we used “page counters” to track site popularity in specific categories, and they would also show how many “live” visitors were currently on the site. Seeing 13 or 15 people visiting at once and maybe up to 200-300 unique visitors per week was genuinely exciting!

Image by Bravenet

My more severe blog was smaizys.lt, an update of the original fantomas.vhost.lt.

The idea for the blog came to me while walking around the neighborhood on a hot June day with my best friend. I remember us walking by a five-story gray Soviet-era apartment building, talking about the meaning of life and what we wanted to do in the future. I kept going about that Cadillac Escalade you might have already seen in the last post.

I couldn’t shake the thought that I needed to do something meaningful—something valuable. Writing online seemed purposeful, something that would last and maybe remind people of me someday.

So, though launching a “professional” blog might have been an impulsive decision, it wasn’t exactly out of the blue, given my background. I jumped in pretty spontaneously and set up WordPress that same day.

The first post was about Adobe Photoshop because I was watching illegally downloaded Adobe Photoshop tutorials, which paved the way for my future in design work. In my free time, I was learning how to retouch photos. I didn’t have a specific goal, but I had five DVDs of tutorials that I watched and practiced just for fun.

These skills came in handy later when I started working with websites. Back then, Adobe Photoshop was the primary tool designers used to create web designs, and developers used it to slice up those designs.

Even today, my Photoshop skills are better than with Figma, which I just can’t get used to, no matter how modern or widespread it may be.

So, from that impulsive blog setup to learning Photoshop out of curiosity, it all contributed unexpectedly to my future.

By the way, if anyone’s interested, my first post was published on 2007-06-12. You can still find the link here: Adobe Photoshop CS3 – Pros and Cons.