Two months ago I managed to let this blogs’ ten year anniversary slip by without so much as a mention. I really did mean to make a bigger deal out of it, I swear!
Alas, I’ve had an on-again-off-again relationship with this blog for much of its life – I go through phases where I write quite a bit – usually when I’m building up to something like Burning Man, Bluesfest, or Toronto International Film Festival – and then long periods where I don’t write anything at all. I’m sure this has ensured that I have a regular readership of about zero, but I’ve never really written this for anybody else.
Sure, I used to have visions of being an a-list blogger with geek cred and advertising dollars, but fact is I just don’t have the dedication or the writing chops to really have at ‘er. But that’s ok. I’ve come to terms with the fact that this thing is very much just a personal site, a bit of a repository of sorts for the parts of my life that are online.
Microblogging and social services elsewhere have eaten away at quite a bit of the little things I once posted here, leaving not a whole lot else. Still, I enjoy having this little place of mine, so I’ve been trying to find ways of integrating those bits and pieces from elsewhere here.
Ideally, this central place would act as the hub of my online presence that either feeds or is fed by other services like Twitter, Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, YouTube, Reader, and so on. That is easier said than done, and I just haven’t had as much time to work on the idea as I’d like.
I’m hoping my Lifestream is a step in the right direction. What you see linked at the top of this page is a WordPress Plugin that aggregates data from a bunch of services that I use online. It’s definitely in need of some styling, and there is a fair bit of work to do to get it pulling in all the data I’d like it to, but it’s definitely laying the groundwork for something.
Much has happened in the world of blogging and the internet since I started this blog. It has survived various blogging services and software, name and domain changes, bizarre traffic fluctuations caused by linking the photo of a certain make-up wearing band, lots of crappy writing and pointless posts, and long bouts of dead silence, but all the while it has played a key role in my online life and identitiy, and I hope it does for many years to come.
Happy belated Birthday bloggy blog!
For posterity: My First (decidedly lame) Post