Online

🧘🏻‍♀️ 2008: Humble beginnings

Little Paw wanted to create an online game after hours on Runescape. I imagined something better – something like a Sims and Skyrim hybrid.

That’s where this all began, who would’ve thought that my favourite hobby of coding and blogging would come from obsessively trying to max out my wood cutting skill on a game? 🤷🏻‍♀️

I found myself starting with the basics: making a website to host my super-kick-ass game idea that I had at the time.

…on Piczo, of course.

Pauline on her laptop — Me on my laptop – I’ve named her Rachel

🙌🏼 2009-2013: Creating OTT websites and the online diary

My focus steered away from the game after I discovered that I have the power to change the colour of text and the background of a web page to whatever I wanted. It was Wildcats colours at one point (did anyone else have a High School Musical phase? No? Ok, I’ll be quiet now.)

After a while, I gained experience in coding and levelled up from Piczo, Freewebs, a subdomain then my very own domain (after I finally won a Namecheap Christmas contest.)

I’ve been blogging throughout my unstable teenage years, sharing embarrassing stories and experiences that everyone must have gone through at least once in their life… like, everyone’s watched their crush throw away their Valentines Day gift in the bin, right? My blog was my online diary.

Social media wasn’t really a thing back then, so I used to write my URL on a piece of scrap paper and hand it to everyone at school. 😂 Old school marketing communications!

The Pawlean brand over time. My current brand identity was created by Teecaake.

🐾💜 2015-present: Converting thoughts to pixels

Sometime during my GCSEs/A-Levels, I took a 2-year long break to focus on my studies and getting into University.

Missing blogging quite a bit, on the 19th of August 2015, I decided to open up my blog again with a little push from a space bear and some fruit flies thrown at me during a lecture. I know, talk about a wake-up call.

My online space has become a huge part of who I am. It’s my place to share, inspire, motivate, bring people together and continue my favourite hobby of converting my thoughts into pixels. ✨

In 2018, I started experimenting on different platforms to bring my writing to life. Since then, I have been creating regular YouTube videos on to compliment my posts, including live conversations that I have with some inspiring people for my column, “Inspiring Figures”. I also started an “everything” podcast in 2020.

🎙 Listen to my blogging story!

I spoke about my blogging story and the impact blogging has had on me over the years at Women in Tech Notts virtual meet-up, have a listen ✨

Support me 💜

If you like the content that I write on Pawlean.com, the things that I share out on social media, podcast or YouTube, support me ✨

The fine print

Pawlean is the pronunciation of my name and was my infamous XBL Gamertag.
My domain from Namecheap and I’m hosted by Matt, with my blog running on WordPress.
Any video graphics that you think are cool were all created by Clark Narvas.
I code all my themes myself which explains why that pixel is off.
All the photos used have been taken by me, a friend, family (sometimes even strangers) or elsewhere (images are always be credited)