Talk about a digression

Today is September 12, 2020, and the western part of the state of Washington is shrouded in smoke that has blown north from California and Oregon.

Even with the global pandemic, it was possible to go outside in our yard or walk around the neighborhood (with proper physical distancing).  Not today!

(Source)

So, stuck inside, I brought this blog up-to-date.

I started blogging at my personal site Above the Garage in ... 1997?  The earliest archive of the site on the Way Back Machine is in 1998 and it looked like this:

There was a subdirectory of articles called "Random Blts"

My first edits were with Hot Dog because HTML was hard.  Except after producing a few articles with Hot Dog I saw that HTML was actually pretty easy.  Later I used Word and exported as HTML - this was before Word bloated the shit out of HTML.  I switched to Blogger in 2004.  Blogger had a little browser-extension button you could use to grab some text from a site you were visiting and use as a starting point for a post.  I did that a lot.

Facebook became a thing - I joined in 2007-ish.  At first it was very twitter-like - short posts.  Later you could mail pictures to it from your phone.  Eventually it consumed all of my posting time.  But I was still interested in blogging and I searched in vain for a new way to do it.  In 2012-06-12 I posted that I was moving to a MediaWiki blog.

Talk about your digressions!  I built a MediaWiki site and started writing articles with a hypertext structure to them.  Apparently I like linking, as I can see in this post.  In 1983/1984 I worked at a company called DayFlo; this was in the early days of the IBM PC and DayFlo's claim to fame was a hypertext editor.  It was built on a database and generally speaking links had to work.  The genius breakthrough of the modern Web is that links don't have to work.  If they don't have to work, you don't need a central database to make sure they work.  Thus the modern distributed web.

(Yet another aside - Roy Fielding and I had the same Ph.D. thesis advisor in college!)

I enjoyed the MediaWiki approach to blogging until I realized how much work it was to manage a MediaWiki site.  I had thought, how bad can it be?  Wikipedia uses it!  Never challenge worse, my wife says.  It was a matter of applying constant bug patches and dealing with weirdness with MySql which was a lot of sideways effort to the mission at hand.

So I looked for a WYSIWYG editor that could also embed audio and video clips, which was quite awkward back-in-the-day, requiring evil Flash plugins.  Squarespace fit the bill.  I imported the site from Blogger (basically abandoning everything that happened in the meantime on MediaWiki) and started onward from there.

Except ... for all that hassle and upgrades from Squarespace 5 to 7 ... I barely blogged at all.  Because of Facebook.  I posted some "Notes" on Facebook that in the past would have been blog entries.

Now Facebook is a cesspool, so I think I'm motivated to return to blogging.  I can't even remember all the blogging sites I have tried over the years that have come and gone.  (Here's one:  https://drstephencw.wordpress.com/ ) But blogger, in spite of Google's penchant for destroying great products, is still here!  And I was able to import the old blog archive and it worked!  Amazing!

I just now, today, while stuck in the smoky house, ported over the 17 articles I had written in Squarespace (they have dates ranging from late 2012 to 2013 and I used their original dates).  I'll probably port over my Facebook notes too.*

And then we'll see.

*I did it!  They have the label "Facebook Note".