7 years, 1,400 posts, 1 exasperated blogger
By the time you read this blog post, you will have noticed that my weblog archives have increased by, oh, fifty-fold. This is because, if all goes to plan, I will have imported all of my blog posts online - all blog posts that I’ve written over the past seven years. The funny ones, the sad ones, the posts that have gotten me in tech magazines and gay magazines and about a bajillion gay Bloggies and in trouble with various employers a couple of times. It’s a lot of stuff to go through, but if you’re old school and want to read an old post, search through the archives (or recommend a post to someone, since I’m not so keen on going through the approximately 1,400 blog entries I just imported from my hard drive. No lie, fourteen hundred, although a couple hundred of those posts are left unpublished since they’re links to dead websites. “I found a great article from webmonkey.com!” Hah.)
You might be wondering why I’m doing this, or why I haven’t done it sooner: a long time ago, I had thoughts of compiling all this madness and somehow using it for financial gain. There’s no shame in admitting that, I think: old school bloggers have their Adsense or their book deals. I’ve also learned that doing something like a book deal takes effort, and that my time is better spent, well, living my current life rather than spending energy trying to capitalize on my past. Not to say I wouldn’t mind some kickback, and maybe I’ll still spend a chunk of time trying to edit down three megabytes of written text into something feasible, but until then, have at it. (Hell, maybe one day I’ll make the whole thing available on a Creative Commons license and someone can write the damn book for me, but I think that will be for another time.)
Going through some old posts and coming back now, I’ve come to the following conclusions:
- My really funny posts - the reason, I’m assuming, why most people came to my blog - happened between three to five years ago, right before I got in my relationship and roommates with my friend Paris, who is a thoroughly hilarious person. Then I entered a relationship, where I cocooned for two and a half years, went through a break-up and watched my parents separate. I mentally fell apart and now that alls been sorted out, I’m less manic and not trying so hard to be “funny ha ha,” as my friend Anil puts it. I’m like a fucked up Frasier-like funny, in that Frasier really isn’t a funny show at all.
- Like all bloggers that started in the early 2000’s, content centered around link commentary, rather than having your blog be a personal soapbox. I had a mini-blog a couple of years ago, and it was a lot of fun, although integrating it with this blog didn’t seem to work so well. I miss that, so for that very reason I’ve set up a tumblr blog - a place to quickly blog about videos I like or links or thoroughly hilarious yet trashy Instant Messenger conversations. As my friend Jason says, it’s 1999 all over again, in the form of gradients and rounded corners. And it really is.
- After reading some old posts, I don’t think I could ever make myself so vulnerable to such a large audience again. But it’s a reflection of a life previous, and the more I realize I’ve changed since those days, the more okay I am with having this stuff available on the Interwebs.
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