This website has evolved in a natural kind of way over eight years, and has been revamped and reorganised several times over those years, and is now due for another overhaul, since the new section brought with it another left hand menu which is different from the original one. Somehow I have to combine the two.
Started work on this before the Christmas break, but needed some time to think about how best to shepherd the hundreds of pages into a more coherent arrangement. I also need to write and re-write some introductory bits.
This section is what most people would call a blog. I’m deliberately not calling it a blog as I hate the word. Not sure why. Hate the words ‘blogging’ and ‘blogged’ even more. Recently on the radio I heard someone say ‘I blogged about this recently’. That is, he wrote about it recently.
As I’m doing my website overhaul, I’ve been getting a bit nostalgic, and have connected up an old external hard drive which holds early versions of this site. It also contains an early ‘blog’ – though in my own text of eight years ago I was still using the original term ‘weblog’. I remembered I’d had a go with Blogger at some point in 2004, but had forgotten that my forays into it were right at the beginning, when I was setting up the ‘York Walks’ which became ‘York Stories’.
No one ever saw my early ‘blog’ – perhaps one friend. So long ago I can’t remember now. I kept it as ‘private’, but did happily record on there how things were progressing with the site. I was aware I was doing it so I could refer back to it later, and copied all the entries to my own computer before deleting the project from Blogger. I decided I’d stick with old-fashioned ’static’ HTML pages, as the blog format didn’t suit what I had in mind.
Funny now to read about my early dilemmas over where to host York Walks/York Stories, what I was trying to do with it. I guess in internet terms the old blog is now a ‘historical document’ of sorts.
By March 2004 I was well into my stride – literally and figuratively – and walked miles. I’d forgotten how exciting and special it was, and how happy I was.
I hope everyone out there writes down similar records/journals of good times, times of discovery and creativity and happiness. I know it’s common to put them on the web and call them a blog. But they’re just as special, maybe more so, if you write them for yourself and if no one else ever sees them but you, years on.
Back to my menu organising …
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