West Karana began in 2005 as a refuge from cluttering up my EverQuest guild’s message boards. I’d just started playing World of Warcraft, and it didn’t feel right to talk about orcs and murlocs in a place devoted to Norrath. So I started a little online diary — mostly for myself — powered by a bit of open-source PHP blog software I’d found by literally typing “simple php blog” into Google.
Back then, I thought of West Karana as a safe little archive. A place where I could jot down what I was playing, what I was building, what I was thinking — and know it would survive whatever might happen to my computer. I didn’t expect anyone to read it. But over time, people did — and that changed everything.
By 2008, I’d switched to WordPress, discovered Google Analytics, and learned that thousands of fellow gamers were wandering in to read about EverQuest II expansions, beta keys for Mythos, and the eternal debate of PS3 versus Xbox 360. Sometimes they stayed for my EQ comics, or because they’d typed “funny bright wizard names” into a search engine and wound up here by mistake.
I learned something important from that era: blogging isn’t really about traffic or stats or keywords. It’s about community. It’s about finding people who love the same strange, beautiful hobbies you do — people who’ll cheer your victories, laugh at your wipes, and occasionally ask how to fly a pegasus in Vanguard. (Still not sure, by the way.)
Now, West Karana is back — older, maybe wiser, definitely more nostalgic. It’s still a home for stories about games, technology, writing, painting, tinkering, and all the joyful rabbit holes that come with being a lifelong gamer. I may wander far from Norrath, but the heart of this blog remains the same: a love of worlds, both virtual and real, and the people who inhabit them.
