Returning to the Blog

It’s been a long time since I’ve done anything with this blog. For a long time now, I’ve been expressing myself through other mediums like podcasting, forums, and micro-blogging. That doesn’t leave a whole lot left for a blog.

Regardless, I upgraded WordPress, and changed the theme. I also switched it over to Google Analytics, as I am doing with all my sites. Being unemployed for the moment, I have time to do maintenance tasks like this. WordPress had failed me for purposes of podcasting, which is why frontrowcrew.com is a custom site built on Django. But the newest version of WordPress very much impressed me as a publishing platform. I was inspired to use it again.

But before I started writing more blog posts, I decided to take a trip back and re-categorize and tag all the existing blog posts. This resulted in the blog being nice and clean, but it also gave me a new perspective. By looking through all of my old posts, I learned a great deal about blogs and myself.

The first thing I noticed is how out of place so many of the posts are. Some of the posts that were new seemed as if they were old, and some old ones seemed as if they were new. I got MechWarrior 2 to work in Linux in 2004. That was five years ago. I wrote an article about figuring out Twitter almost a year ago. Has it really been that long? My perception of time and events doesn’t really match reality, and looking back on a blog has helped reset my outlook.

Also, I’m really shocked at how ahead of the curve I am. I always sort of felt that I’m one step behind the game. I thought of the idea to have Slashdot with voting, but Digg made it first. I posted an “audio blog” in 2004, but podcasting beat me by a hair. What I completely forgot about, before reading the blog, was a small project I made once called “glues”. It parsed instant message log files for URLs, and created an RSS feed out of them, or posted them to del.icio.us automatically. That’s entering Twitter territory a little bit there.

Another thing that amazed me was what topics I discussed the most. I was very surprised by how many meta-posts I made, that is to say blog posts about the blog itself. There’s really no point in having them at all unless readership is very large. Also amazing was how many posts I made about Linux, distros, etc. and how many of the things discussed are now non-issues. Yet, many things like audio support in Linux are still just as much a problem now as they were then. 

Even if you already express yourself in other ways, I recommend having a blog. Even with the very small number of posts I have made, looking back at it has been extremely valuable. I have added a “blog this” button to my browser, and I hope to use this space more often to express any ideas I have which are bigger than 140 characters. Even if nobody is reading, bein able to have this experience again five years from now is valuable enough to be worth the investment.