Retro-Blog! Going Back in Time & LiveJournal

As I mentioned in my blog post earlier this month, I’ve decided to go back through my fifteen years of posts to clean up some of the narrative of my life (with some code fixes) on the Internet. To be clear, I’m not delving into an exercise of revisionist history. The purpose of this is more about formatting, grammar, and actual content.

For example: in the early LiveJournal days, some posts would be just a picture with a caption to tell a story. Remember that this was the pre-Instagram and “image post” on Tumblr era – so it was the ONLY way to tell those stories in what is now a common Internet style of narrative. The issue that’s been created is that, contrary to popular belief, everything on the Internet isn’t eternal.  Hence there might be posts that link to images that don’t exist on the web anymore rendering the blog post itself into nonsense. Posts like these will be culled or I’ll find the original image and host it here on the blog site itself or I’ll add some text explaining the missing photos/pictures.

I plan to repost these retro posts via my Twitter and my public Facebook feed with short notes explaining bits that I remember. Even just looking at my very first blog post makes me realize that there are missing pieces need for context so many years later. The post reads:

Okay… I’ve succumbed to the waves of peer pressure and finally set up a LiveJournal account.  Thanks Amy for supplying the code and thanks Shannon for telling me where most of the stuff was in the set up. I will be taking spare time at work (computer sales are SLOW) to work on polishing the set up of this thing.

Suggestions here would be a plus.

I did, in true online geek fashion, list my interests.  I have one for each letter of the alphabet.   Shannon has already told me that I’m going to internet-hell for doing something so blatantly dorky. Such is life. 🙂

The “code” I’m referring to here is an invite code. LiveJournal wasn’t originally something anyone could sign up for. You needed an invitation from another user. A friend of mine from the Wasabi Anime Tampa club, Amy, was the one who provided me with one.

The “computer sales are SLOW” remark is referencing a short gig I had back then selling PCs via a call center for Dell.

See?  The Internet, my life, and the world in general was a difference world in 2003.

If all goes according to plan, I’ll re-queue these posts using Hootsuite denoting the date of the original post and (if applicable) an anecdote about it/clarifying it.  The first one will start tomorrow since it was my first blog post and I’ll be reposting it… exactly fifteen years later.