2014.09.08
(As usual, I used my Date Toy tool to count the days for me. Man-- 5000... I remember celebrating my personal 10,000th day in 2001, I had a little party, "K10K". Crazy to think I've been doing this site for half as long as that.
Yesterday I did a search, and found I had only missed 5 days (each of the 5 now have placeholders) -- 2011.07.07, 2013.03.16, 2013.05.04, 2013.05.08, and 2013.05.13. (Not sure why last May was so rough!) Of course, I had missed previous entries, but had already backfilled them, generally within a day or two.
I wish I had something bigger in mind to celebrate the occasion. Like it would be a perfect time to bring it to a close, or maybe move it to tumblr. (The homebrew nature of the digital underbelly of the site is amusing to me... it's pretty good, actually, I drag and drop images to upload things to my edit tool and everything.)
The site (then http://kisrael.com/ ) had existed for a while before, but I decided to jump on this whole new "blog" bandwagon I'd been enjoying with other people. Some of it was moving the quote journal I kept on my old Palm Pilot (remember them?) to a place it was more readily shared.
For a while, in the mid-2000s, this place was a little online hub for some of my friends and family. I think FB sucked the air out of the room for that - it's difficult for one site by one person to be as compelling as a site that will stitch together a single page from LOTS of friends and family. And then spammers came and overran my humble little homebrew comments system, and I've since shut it down.
In that same era I alwso enjoyed a guest-run sidebar -- first Dylan's Sidebar, then Dylan and Sarah's, then The Sidebar of the People.
Over the years the content changed as well... the current site is (usually) less chatty than the old days. Early on I started using the "of the Moment" framing for individual things, which I guess got dropped a while back when I started putting twitter/tumblr like "short form links and quotes and images" in a special "of the Moment" box. The "real entry" / "of the Moment" dichotomy still exists, but it doesn't mean very much anymore.
I sometimes wish I had a tag system or somesuch to separate the wheat from the chaff here- make it easy for me to pick out my personal projects and "good photo days" (or special theme days like monthly musical roundups or One Second Everydays) and rambling essays from all the days of random quotes and links. I guess that's what I was doing with my Best-Of page, but it hasn't been updated for years.
One reason I've been slow to switch to tumblr, with its laudable community sharing culture, is giving up feeding this site's retrospect feature, where I can see what I posted on this date going back over the years. It was awesome 4 or 5 years ago, but now I admit the view is long... 14 plus years of material (it covers the 4 years or so of my Palm Pilot journal as well) is a bit too much.
So I dunno. I guess I'll just keep on keeping on, regardless of a nagging suspicion how my Foolish Consistency with it reflects a psychological disfunction, that changing course would reflect a rebuttal and rejection of my former self... I wish I had an easier time embracing the concept of personal change and growth. On the other hand, I still enjoy having this blog, and I refer to it quite often, and am grateful how useful it is for digging up half-remembered anecdotes and quotes and links.
5000... yeesh!