New Collections tiles are up. Everything is live again. Everything bloggy that I’d already pulled over from the Blogspot carcass of Elliequent is back up. Only difference now is everything runs chronologically, year by year. With fourteen years worth of blogging to organize, I wanted a way to read back through the whole series in order.

But I am still actively pulling over old content. And it’s a process which will take some time, because I didn’t know I’d want to keep as much as it turns out I do.

At first I was scanning through posts quickly, deleting any (from the back end, where Blogger does not show content previews) that didn’t sound familiar. But I kept coming across gems that I have no recollection whatsoever of writing, like this one. I guess that’s bound to happen when you have some 1300 posts. So then I had to slow down and be more surgical. And I’m not going year by year, which would make sense. I’m just kind of skipping around a bit, partly due to the Blogger interface (IDK what’s happening back there, but I think it’s just glitching out because it’s so ancient), and partly because it keeps my interest better that way. So there are still huge gaps of time, and no single year is by any means complete yet.

I want to keep content that is high-effort and reflective of my identity and experiences. Or at least fun, or funny. I don’t want to keep the low-effort, lazy stuff. And there’s a lot of that. So the only solution is to pick through it post by post. Then I have to decide where it goes (should it be brought in as dated content, or is it more creative / evergreen?), manually copy the content over, fix the formatting, and occasionally update anchor links. It’s extremely time consuming. Yesterday I spent 12 hours at my desk, doing nothing else. Friday we closed early for the holiday and when I say I was at it within ten minutes—all the way through to 11pm. I was on fire. And I’m very happy to have it to do—it means the world to me—but holy cow what a massive labor of love.

And it’s not always as easy as “keep” or “ditch”. There are some major events in my life I don’t necessarily want to revisit. There is stuff related to jobs that I’m conflicted about keeping—stuff that gives essential context for what was happening in my life, but which is so boring to re-read. And there are entire relationships or quasi-relationships that don’t actually feel real, looking back. I know it doesn’t make sense, but it doesn’t feel like me who was actually in them. And then there are opinion pieces I wrote—on culture, or self-improvement, or even politics—that are just atrocious and cringe and make me want to walk without stopping into Lake Michigan, never to return. IDK. In the end I will probably keep nearly everything. But right now I am having to put some things aside to circle back to, while I let my delayed-processing brain do its thing.

When I make a final decision on a post, it either gets ported over then deleted from Blogger, or just deleted, period. So when this is all done, there’ll be nothing left there at all, and I will finally delete the Blogspot for good. I’m down to about 850 posts left to go through.

I will say this. Re-reading it all makes me want to keep going with that avenue of things. If you come through here at all with any frequency, you know how absolutely all over the place I am, about the personal content. I have been experimenting for months and months, trying to figure out how or what I want to share, and in what way. I mean, the whole site has changed so much. I have ditched entire areas, because all of a sudden I was completely over the need to share certain things (i.e., the passion projects pages, or my plants, or my apartments). And I’ve tried about a million different ways to share personal content, testing to see how it makes me feel to put things here or there, to leave them up for good, or pull them after a short time live (which is the current modus operandi).

It is tempting to use the new Journaling section as a place to continue personal blogging more quietly. Any bad actors fishing around would really have to make an effort to get to latest. And anyone looking to cause trouble (because I have stupidly overshared my URL with people who never should have gotten it) would look like an absolute fucking idiot, dredging up some quiet back room of my website where I am just minding my own business.

IDK. It’s a thought.

Anyway, if for some reason you are so hard up for reading material that you’d want to go back and read my personal blog from the beginning—sit tight. I will announce when it is complete.