I created my first website for a financial business in 1997 in HTML 1.0, working with back-end developers to move the company’s entire inventory to the Web. It was a side project, and I didn’t see myself becoming a programmer.
Just for fun, I built another one, a celebrity fan page, in 1999, on the Tripod service. Coding in HTML was easy for me, and new web tools were making it easier than ever for non-programmers to participate on the World Wide Web.
In the early 2000s, a new form of amateur journalism had emerged: blogging. Anyone could share their diary and most intimate thoughts with total strangers! What could be weirder and more exciting than that?
So I started a blog in 2003 called The Soulful Blogger, and parts of it endure to this day thanks to having been preserved in Soulfully Gay. If you wanted to know the answer to the question, “Who is Joe Perez?”, then you had a definitive place to go.
From 2003 to the present, I’ve blogged more often than not, though I left it aside for several years a few times. I wrote a lot of blog posts under nearly a dozen blog titles. I didn’t save all my blogs when I finished them and so I’ve lost track, keeping an archive of only 2,248 posts.
My blogs were places for experiments in consciousness, and I was always trying something new. I have the peculiar personality trait of not caring so much about what other people think of me, so I feel free to branch out in different directions and explore different sides of my personality and philosophy.
Web 3.0’s arrival in the mid-to-late 2000s, the historians already tell us, killed blogging because it made it even easier for non-programmers to create personal content while restricting its audience so the whole world wouldn’t be watching them as if they were parading in their underwear.
After my friends and fans joined Facebook, pretty soon no one wanted to visit my blog. Visitor traffic plummeted and most bloggers gave it up to become social media personalities. I joined Facebook right away, but I also stepped back from blogging for a long time.
Now I’m back at it, and this time for good. This blog — let’s just call it my Integral Ministry Blog — has come, and it has replaced my old Worldview Artist site at Joe-Perez.com. It is distinct from my Integralist Newsletter on Substack, which will contain longer musings (900 words or longer) such as book reviews and philosophical expositions. And then there’s my Facebook page, which has never been good for much, but which hopefully may serve at least to send updates from both of these media to my fans.
My hope with my Integral Ministry Blog is to give you glimmers into my life and work as a minister, as a writer working with Spirit on new books, and my thoughts on the religious life and personal spiritual development.