I’m still in a bit of a post-Faculty Academy holding pattern, and today I found myself searching for ways to procrastinate unpleasant administrative duties.
So, I decided to take some time and review my blog archive. It occurred to me while looking it over that in a few months I’ll have been blogging for three years, which seems like a really long time, actually. That’s kind of weird.
We talk a lot about the blog as a mechanism for reflection and narration (of our own thought processes), but, honsestly, I’m not sure I’ve ever taken the time to do my own reflection. (Again, it would be nice if I started to take my own darn advice.)
The exercise was pretty fascinating.
First, I discovered that, unfortunately, I seem to have lost close to a year’s worth of posts. When I transferred from B2 to WordPress in the summer of 2005, something must have happened that borked my entries. Actually, I’m thinking it was a subsequent WP upgrade that caused the problem, and I just never noticed until now. So, I’m only getting the first paragraph of so of my first year of blog posts. That’s a bummer. Luckily, somewhere on my PowerBook I’ve got the original B2 database backup. A summer project for me will be figuring out how to extract the missing texts.
The thing that struck me most while going through the posts was how totally inaccurate my internal chronology of ideas was. Things that I had thought about quite some time ago seemed like much more recent revelations. Other ideas that I had only recently had seemed so internalized it was like I had blogged them three years ago. It made me wonder how screwed up my general mental chronology must be. The only reason I know it’s the case with the blog is that I’ve got a record I can trace. Without that record I’m at the mercy of my own inadequate memory. There seems to be something to ponder, there.
I was also taken aback by the posts that I had completely forgotten about. There were ideas that might as well have been someone else’s, but since they’re on my blog, I guess I wrote them! How disconcerting.
Ultimately, it’s just amazing to have this mental narrative to mine and reflect upon. And I’m not a prolific blogger! Actually, it makes me think I need to seriously commit to a more serious blogging commitment. It never occurred to me that going back through my blog would affect me that way. . .
If you haven’t recently re-read your own blog archive (and I know it will take some of you MUCH longer than it took me ;), I encourage you to do so. Then blog about what it was like. . .
I do this on occasion. Usually, I’ll look back to exactly a year ago today or two years ago and see if there’s a cycle of feeling or thought. Looks like we started at exactly the same time. I actually started in June 2004, but my posts from June to August were lost in a change in blog software. I didn’t even archive them, sigh. Good idea for a blog post–and good idea to do this in a class.
I recently discovered two WP plugins (thanks to D’Arcy) that offer an interesting way at a blogs archive. The first, Random Posts, shows number of random posts in your sidebar, it is always fascinating for me to see what comes up. The other, “Similar Posts,” is a really smart plugin that assocites a single post with others that have similar title, category, tags, etc. Another way to allow both you and your readers to access the archive through several methods. Sorry, Laura, not sure if they have this for blogger 😉
Sorry, I forgot to add the link. You can find both plugins on the author’s blog here: http://rmarsh.com/plugins/
Bravo, Martha– I am always dipping back into old posts as a way to check in with myself, to develop ideas dropped along the way, to revise, and just to marvel at the journey.
(I’ve lost complete blogs–awful.)
Yes.
I’m eagerly awaiting your recovery of year one. You grokked blogging right away and inspired me to keep going. I am confident that I’d be inspired all over again.
“Life piled on life were all too little….”