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	years of journaling
	December 15th, 2019
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	A few of you brilliant gopherites have been talking about the
	length of time they've been blogging [0,1]. 20 years is a lot of
	blog posts whether collected on the web or gopher. It's great to
	see collections like this all together surviving so long.

	[0] It was 20 years ago today
	[1] On 16 years of blogging

	I've had people go spelunking down into my own blog [2] archives
	before and I have to say it's a really cool feeling. Journaling is
	inherently about yourself. When another human decides to spend
	their time reading your personal thoughts and history, it's very
	flattering (at least to me).

	[2] tomasino blog

	There are technical blogs aplenty which focus on code or math or
	science or whatever topic that isn't the self. They're great too,
	but I don't see them the same way. I'm sure they provide great
	interest to people when they're published, and interesting history
	to those that come later. Sharing a personal blog is so much more
	intimate. Keeping one up for an extended period of time is its own
	type of vulnerability. It's not just showing your timely thoughts
	of today, but also the cringe-worthy worries of younger you. It's
	easy to spotlight the mistakes, the lack of understanding, and the
	ideas that you'd eventually grow out of. That's beautiful stuff,
	if horribly embarrassing.

	I started journaling when I was 14. I have a shelf of paper
	journals sitting over there --> that I flip through still. I still
	do some paper journaling these days, too. Those moleskines aren't
	going to fill themselves, after all.

	It wasn't until 1998 that I started writing a blog online. I was
	off to college and learning how to do all this crazy web stuff.
	I kept text notes on that website for a while (lost now even to
	the wayback machine, sadly). I later moved to livejournal and kept
	a pretty decent journal there with a ring of friends. Thankfully
	I harvested some of those old posts before nuking my livejournal
	account years later. Those earliest posts on my blog now were
	written there. They've been updated a few times to move to
	wordpress, jekyll, and now hugo. I keep that stuff in git now,
	too. Better peace of mind, for sure.

	Anyway, I don't have much more to say on the subject. It's pretty
	cool that I've almost got 20 years of journaling history up on the
	internet myself. I hope I have much more to offer down the line in
	gopher as well.