--- author: email: mail@petermolnar.net image: https://petermolnar.net/favicon.jpg name: Peter Molnar url: https://petermolnar.net copies: - http://web.archive.org/web/20200626142800/https://petermolnar.net/note/re-ohhelloanablogblogging-and-me/ in-reply-to: https://ohhelloana.blog/blogging-and-me/ lang: en published: '2020-06-10T10:15:00+01:00' --- Ana, this is a wonderful post. It covers a journey, with invaluable takeaways; thank you for writing it. This response is just replies to bits and pieces from it. I recently went through archived versions of my site. The contents, and the generic ideas followed the path of: - in 2004: stuff I found on the internet, things I'm interested in, guestbook, microblog(!), links, etc. - in 2007: streamlined content, basic ventures into literature, photos; a lot of former random content already gone - in 2010: photo- and sysadmin portfolio with curated images and tech-only blog entries - in 2015: insane amount of content raked together from social media, and other silos, like last.fm, along with the anything since the 2010 version - in 2017: the great purge and finally some clarify of what I want to be on my site and what to be in private archives - in 2020: a sudden urge (due to ) to dig up content I potentially "lost" by simly forgetting about them Therefore I believe the wave you went through is not at all unusual, and many of us made similar mistakes by trying to take too much away from our sites. > You’re more than your job title! You’re a whole person! Please make this big, bold, and allow it to stand out - that is a very important sentence :) Especially considering: > So, unconsciously, I started to ignore my interests in order to fit in > with the rest. > > I began to feel guilty for having fun in my free time - one time, one > co-worker asked me what were my plans for the weekend and when I said > it, his reply was: “maybe you should stay at home reading a javascript > book”. Years ago I read an article on how Instagram is reducing us to a single aspect of ourselves, because an account is only successful if it's streamlined to a single aesthetics. It's sickening how many people started living like this, believing sentences like these. We're not simple creatures, we should never, ever, focus on a single aspect of possibilities. > “Share what you learn. And the best time to share is while you’re > learning it. (You’ll have a voice in your head saying ‘Everyone knows > this already’... Ignore that voice.)” This is probably the reason why I never had the issues with my tech entries: I always thought about them as my personal notes, and how-tos, so it didn't matter if it was done before or not, or if it was perfect or not - it's how I did it. Most of them were results of hours, days, weeks of works, so regardless of the content, it certainly felt mine. > Treat it like a hobby. If your hobby is cooking, you don't expect to > have an audience in your kitchen whenever you're baking right? Treat > your blog the same way. Do it for yourself. I'd go one step further: treat it like your virtual home. Like a *homepage*. > As I said before: you’re more than your job title. Don’t know what to > post? Here are some ideas: Today I learned, travel, cooking, job > stuff, thoughts, “retrospectives”, experiences, just photos. > EVERYTHING IS VALID. Indeed. > The Wayback Machine is there to remind me that everything you do on > the internet, stays on the internet forever. If only that was true. I spent countless of hours looking for long lost websites from the ancient Hungarian internet (read: pre 2002), disappeared photo albums of summer rock festivals, forsaken blogs. No, the internet forgets. Everything decays. I lost the first 2 iterations of my website completely - '99 and 2000 versions -; I can't even find traces of it. A few paragraphs later you mention: > There were a few more tweets from other people that were very > important to me but because they were posted around 2013 -2015 I just > couldn’t find them anymore. So the problem is real. > I remember loving Dynamic Drive ![copy-pasting mouse trailing bouncing balls in JS was a big thing](flashback-meme.jpg) There was also . > “I miss the useless web. I miss your grandpa’s blog. I miss weird web > art projects that trolled me. I miss fan pages for things like hippos. > I wish I didn’t feel like the web was collapsing into just a few sites > plus a thousand resumes.” Sarah Drasner, > I recently discovered . Whoever made it brought the web 1.0 back into my life. Just start pressing "[surprise me...](https://wiby.me/surprise/)", it'll land you on a forsaken site left behind by the first settlers of the internet.