Seven Years Running

Before I had a proper content management system for my blog (i.e. Movable Type), I updated my blog manually. This was back from September 2002 to March 2004. For a few months after that, I used LiveJournal.

It’s been slow going, importing all those old entries into MT, and I’m not done yet. I’ve recently taken up the project again, working backward through time, and am currently importing blog entries from Spring 2003, around the time Aaron and I got married — I had to create a category called wedding — and around the time my Memaw died of complications from lung cancer.

Since I have to at least glance through every entry I import, to make sure my customized PHP script correctly stripped and reorganized my Dreamweaver HTML code into MT Import format, I’m being reminded of so many things that were going on in my life back then. Our wedding and Memaw’s illness were at the heart of it, yes, but I was also noticing how overweight I was, and I was complaining about a job I wouldn’t leave for another six months.

It amazes me how naive I was about blogging back then. I literally had an audience of about a dozen close friends, and although part of me knew that my blog was technically open for anyone in the world to read, I didn’t actually think anyone would care. Now, though, as I’m looking through the rants about work and the details of my bachelorette party, I’m having to decide whether to edit certain things, or to just leave them for posterity and trust that a future employer won’t blackball me because I took three drags from a joint in the privacy of my own home once upon a time.

There will eventually be official blog entries back to late September 2002, and a few brief bits (before I knew what a “blog” was, and was just copying off of Timmay‘s regular updates) from early 2001, during my last semester in the dorms.

It’s a blast from the past, for sure.