Today I came to the realisation that my ‘x years ago on this day you blogged…‘ widget is a great way to every day do a recap of those postings and capture the ideas in it in my notes. In a year it would mean all readily apparant ideas mentioned here since 2002 would be included in my notes as well as their interconnectedness, in two years it would mean I’d have had a second iteration on it.
I also realised that after a year (or two), having processed my blog that way, I could do the same thing on the thus emerging collection of notes themselves, as I have a way of surfacing all notes from e.g. July 12th in any given year.
This is akin to how I am my own blog’s most intensive reader already, reading back and forth, following links etc. But it could now be aimed at capturing some of that in a different form than the blog’s timeline.
Probably I could do the same for my existing Evernote collection, although I suspect it would be much less fruitful. My blog is my own writing, output resulting from my own thinking, doing and curation. A large chunk of my Evernote is a snippet collection from around the web without much context. Except for elements I already marked during note taking for action or as ideas, those would be easily findable.
Inspired by Ton’s mention of an on this day page for his blog, I created a similar page for mine: it links to all the posts written on the current day of the current month, back to 1999.
I also created a companion RSS feed: subscribing to this will get you a flow of barrel-aged posts.
Having been at this for 21 years (long enough that I didn’t even think of mentioning it when the anniversary clock ticked over on May 31, 2020), there’s almost 40% of my life reflected in these pages, and thus lots I don’t remember writing, lots I’m vaguely uncomfortable having written (mostly on matter of style or naïvety). But there is also lots to remember.
Many of the posts from the early days suffer from formatting issues, broken images, and so on, and I’ve never come up with a sustainable method for editing them; I’m going to try doing this in 365 chunks, editing each day’s “on this day” posts as best I can to make them ship-shape. I’ll leave broken links that link elsewhere in place, for posterity, but where I can find missing images, or better versions of existing images, I’ll edit the posts and replace them.
Prepare to reminisce.
History
Blogging
That makes me think that a possibly-helpful Obsidian plugin would grab the “x years ago today” bloated from an RSS feed and insert them as Markdown.
I think I rather do that manually. What I’m trying to get at is the ideas in those postings, not the postings per se. And then enter the separate ideas into separate notes. This morning I processed a posting on ‘open data works in triangles’ resulting in a range of notes, on microcontent, on Jyri’s objects of sociality, on how open data is an object of sociality, on how social software works in triangles, on pivots in information paths, and how it all ties to designing information strategies. Not all my postings will be as rich, but teasing all that out is the work I am looking for, not so much the archiving of material itself.
Ever since I was a child in primary school, my mental image of a year has been that of a circle, with January and December at the bottom, and July and August at the top (you’ll notice that this means the months aren’t evenly spaced around the circle in my mental image, spring takes up less of the circle than the fall. It’s a mental image, not a precise graph, likely influenced by my childhood sense of the endlessness of summers, and the long period of darkening days of fall and winter).
My mental image of a year ever since childhood
This Monday I completed a full circle around that image: I’ve been reading my own blog posts from previous years on each day, to see which of those I can take an idea or notion from to convert into a note in my digital garden (named ‘Garden of the Forking Paths‘). Peter has been going around the circle with me I read today (which in turn prompted me to write this), starting from my posting about it last year. He’s been reading his old blogposts every day, not just to reread but also to repair links, bring home images to self-host, clean up lay-out etc. I’m sure I am and have been my own blog’s most avid reader ever since I started writing in this space 19 years ago, and like Peter had been using my ‘on this day’ widget to repair old blog posts since I added the widget in early 2019.
Now I’ve come full circle on reading those blogposts for a year to mine them for their ideas and notions. The next cycle until the summer of 2022 I am adding a layer.
I will of course be making another round through my own blogposts like I did before. Because sometimes I missed a day, I haven’t repaired all of them each day, and I may take new meaning from them the next time I read them.
The layer I’m adding is also reviewing the personal notes I made on this day last year. This concerns the daily notes I make (a habit I started in April 2020), the other notes I’ve created on a certain date (work notes, ideas, travel etc), and indeed the blog posts I converted to notes dated on this day last year.
I see Frank has also picked up on Peter’s posting, and is embarking on a year of reading his own daily postings as well. Like Frank, I have never blogged on this day of the year since this blog started. And like for his blog, that has now changed.
Going in circles… I suspect life is circles, not turtles, all the way down. At least when you get a bit older that is.