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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. |