The Blog is 10 years old today, and that calls for some sort of Celebration. <\/p>\n
In fact my page-making\/html-wrangling life goes back 20 years, and began with online guides intended for distribution to specific audiences, initially in the ‘Library Instruction’ mode. These gradually morphed into subject-defined weblets, and then into dated and accretive logfiles<\/a>. The earliest logfiles I can still find are from March and April 1998, just about 16 years ago, by which time I’d established the habit of opening a new logfile whenever I began a line of inquiry that I thought would be likely to persist. Many of the hyperlinks I collected in those pages are now dead dead dead, but often it’s possible to see\/recover the process of discovery<\/i> I enjoyed as I searched and read. A few examples: Spring 1995 OED exploration<\/a>, 1995 page on searches in Biology literature<\/a>, my first University Scholars course<\/a> (History of Technology, winter 1999), and a suite of pages for my Fall 2002 sabbatical<\/a>. Many more can be found via the Web Legacy summary<\/a> (compiled Spring 2005).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
By 2003 I wanted to explore RSS-linked blogging, but couldn’t get W&L’s computing services interested in hosting the necessary software; I finally set up my own oook.info domain in March 2004, and instantiated OookBlog using MovableType software. I’ve used the blog to track day-to-day discoveries and ruminations, mostly as a sort of electronic journal, with myself as the primary reader. In 2013 I transferred the contents to WordPress, and augmented the overall presentation with links to other material at the top of the page.<\/p>\n
\nThis morning I decided that improving the tagging of posts would be a good step at Year 10, so I’ve spent today going through the posts to add tags. Along the way I’ve reacquainted myself with stuff I’d forgotten about, and begun to think about things I might do more systematically in the next 10 years. I wish I’d been more systematic about blogging my reading, and I’m not too pleased with the categories or the consistency of my tagging (argybargy<\/a> and musics<\/a> show up a lot, also quote<\/a> and reading<\/a>; metastuff<\/a> is my own creation). I’m surprised at the number and diversity of music videos (and note that quite a few are no longer available). The daily capture of my Delicious feed ended in September 2011, but I’ve discovered that my Delicious tags DO still work! The Zotero link<\/a> is the best I’ve been able to do as a replacement for Delicious.<\/p>\n
\nA few nuggets I was especially pleased to rediscover: the tune Otiose Maggie<\/a>; a nice grasshopper picture<\/a>; my first experiment in podcasting: On Musical Variety<\/a> (2004); elements of my Nova Scotia Faces project: the sad tale of Poor Alice G.<\/a> and two nice videos<\/a>; and a scattering of poetical bits: haiku\/senryu written while hiking the Appalachian Trail in Maine in 2002<\/a>, a farewell to Makeshift<\/a>, two on patriotic excess<\/a>, one on debts of gratitude<\/a>, and a longer one on connections<\/a>.<\/p>\n