Traveling through time
I started my blogging journey sometime around 2004. Blogs started to pop-up like mushrooms for a while, or actually web-log as they where called back then. I didn’t understand the fuss about it, why would I want to post my life or parts of it publicly. I can’t recall when I first encountered blogs for the first time, I just vaguely remember that around 2004 I started one myself based on serendipity. It broke sometime in 2005, I had no backups of that and restarted again with serendipity and everything from that point on was, kind of, backed up. I did later migrate to Wordpress and with this migration a bit of content got lost, a later migration to octopress and now hugo. I know, technical stuff, not everyone’s favorite topic. Bear with me for a bit, I need to explain the foundation for the rest to make sense. The latter two (octopress and hugo) are so called “static site generators” and save all the data in simple text files. No complicated databases, just simple plain text files which can be archived very simple and are kind of future proof. Since these are simple text files, there where also easy to back up and archive and also easy to restore later and put it back online.
And here’s the point I wanted to reach. I restored most of my blogs starting 2005, didn’t finish as I am reading them an also dropping crappy posts. No all of it, it’s fun to reread my old crap, but some of it really is just bad, doesn’t make sense or doesn’t really reflect what and how I think these days. That stuff is 20 years old after all.
What is so great about blogging?
As you might have noticed by now, I did give into the blogging thing and it is sometimes fun to write things. Mostly I did it with technical things I was dealing with. A problem I had and the solution I found for it. This was helpful for me if I encountered the same issue later or also for other people to not have to go through the same trouble of finding a solution. It was a way to pay back for all the other people’s blog posts that helped me and continue to help me to this day. If I search for a problem I have, a IT related one, most of the time it’s still blog posts that are being found, not social media posts. But I did also start to post personal things, and it’s interesting to read old things you wrote, to rediscover how you where thinking, what you where experiencing and how the world used to be. We tend to forget, our mind makes us remember things differently or presents us memories different as it happened in reality. Reading your old self is like a time travel in a way. You don’t like writing publicly, no problem, take a notepad and write (and I should probably follow the same advice, I am really writing to little). If I look at my old posts, sometimes I wrote three posts a day or more, very short as one would do now on social media, but here’s the great thing about these old blog posts, I have the archive, I have the backups and I can access it 20 years later. Which brings me to the next topic.
Why not just post it on social media?
Remember what I wrote at the beginning about keeping what you write future safe. Posting things on social media does not mean it will be out there forever or sometimes not even for a decade. What will happen with all your content and your memories that you have posted on facebook, twitter, Reddit … Think I am exaggerating? Ask everyone that had a myspace account what happened to their data, if you have been on the internet long enough to remember myspace, sorry to remind you that you’re officially old. If you’re too young for that, take twitter. After it was purchased by Elmo, a lot of it was made inaccessible, won’t go into all the technical details. The next issue is access. Just because you can access your account now, doesn’t mean you can access it forever. An mistaken automated account lockout, a post that might violate your favorite social media guidelines, or any other account lockout that can occur and it’s all gone.
Is there another way to recover my old shit?
Well, glad you asked. There is a very nice project called WayBackMachine from archive.org that enables you to go and find how webpages looked like a long time ago. Even pages that don’t exist anymore. You could travel to some of my first servers I had on the internet in 2001 then continue to 2004 where apparently I wrote the content in german. It’s a very nice project and I will donate to keep it alive. It did help me out quite a few times, like rediscovering a comment on my old blog I wrote about in the coincidences post
Rediscovering your old self
I found it amusing and also interesting in rereading these old things. For example me writing in 2006 about nostalgic songs reminding of “simpler” times. Which I find funny now because now listening to the same song actually reminds me of the area around 2006 as simpler times or the 90s, it changes and funny that I was thinking to write something similar recently just now to find out I wrote the exact same thing 20 years ago.
Which reminds me a bit about what I saw on a documentary explaining that we don’t remember the initial event. We remember the last time we remembered that event. Let me rephrase this. Your brain saved some memory in 1997, you remember that memory in 2001, then in 2006. This means that in 2006 you are actually remembering your memory about the memory that you had while remembering in 2001. The brain is truly fascinating isn’t it? Which brings me back to saying I should write more. Read my old crap from time to time and share more of stuff that is fun or in some way helpful or just pure and utter crap that will make me laugh years later or even cry and thought patterns that still are the same after almost 20 years - the second one still being tough to read after all these years. Or how I hated last Christmas even in 2005. Or take the post about new horizons being launched in 2006 when Pluto actually was still a fucking planet.
Won’t drag out this post any longer than it has to be, just hope I could inspire you to get started journaling, blogging and rediscover nice memories decades later.
Comments
With an account on the Fediverse or Mastodon, you can respond to this post. Known replies are displayed below:
Note: This will load data from mastodon.social.