In the summer of 2000 I decided to have my own website. I used some cheesy, annoying template from earthlink and put up some goofy photos, crafty ideas, and a few “essays” on various topics that amused me. In this state it sat with little or no updating for three years until the winter of 2002 when I registered sparklej dot com. It stayed pretty dormant until March 2003 when I finally built some structure and put up some content. Hooray for basic html tutorials and notepad! I started a blah blah blahg and in April I found some bloggish software for to keep track of archives and comments and what not. Then a couple of years (?) later that broke (and crashed the whole site), and I went back to hand-coding in 2005… I think. Here my memory is a bit fuzzy. After that got way too tedious for words, I installed Word Press. This was 2006, judging by the archives list on the side bar over there. I uploaded some old posts from 2003, but I never got around to uploading all the other ones. Those are still on the old hard drive waiting for me to do something with them.

I’m not exactly sure what I want to do with them, or any of the old archives, but I think it’ll involve printing out most of them to keep for posterity. The diaries and letters of manuscript collections are always the most fun. Well, maybe not always, but usually. The point is that they exist and you can get a good sense of the personality of the people in question when you read their own account of their lives. If my computer or server goes kaput then I’ve pretty much lost the last several years of my life. Not the end of the world, no, but it would be a sad loss for me, even if most of my entries are about me being stressed out with all the stuff I have to do. Especially the posts from the end of every semester. Annoying or not, it’s my own account of my life, and it’s important to me. And no, I don’t expect my personal papers to be of any use to any historical collection, I’m just saying that having personal accounts are important. And if I have children, and if they have children, then someone somewhere down the line might be interested to know what I was like.

I didn’t actually intend for this to be a post about my potential posterity, but there you go.