Back In Time

With the help of the Internet Archives and their Wayback Machine, I am slowly cutting/pasting/posting some of this website’s missing articles that somehow did not migrate and log.

The Machine only takes snapshots and not the full site, so I’m positive there are a lot of posts missing and maybe gone forever.

I was missing four years from 2013-2017 and I have regained a lot since my last post on this. I’ll finish porting over the rest tomorrow. For now, I am hopeful and in debt to the Internet Archive organization. Now my website’s Archive Page has listings for the previous twenty four consecutive years.

The WayBack Machine

Have you heard about the Internet Archive? I have but somehow always forget that it is available. It is a library of books, software, music, websites and more. A perfect blend of old and new knowledge. This is truly a national treasure.

Did I mention websites? It’s true- the WayBack Machine deploys spiders across the world wide web to take snapshots of websites. They send them out everywhere and my old websites were caught at least two times a month. This is how I discovered a problem with my own personal archives.

There are missing records.

I verified this when I searched the Archives Page on my own site. From September 2013 until November 2017, FOUR YEARS of my writing cannot be found.

Screenshot of this site way back in 2014. None of that is on my site currently. Aargh!

I did a cursory search on one of my hard drives just for the year 2015 that turned up 37,000 results, none of them were my writings. I’ll need to check the rest but for now I am bummed. No idea what happened but hope I can find them, post them, back them up online and in print.

HTML

I am in a mood again. Thinking about keeping this website online as a private online archive while at the same time, writing to the journal inside my own offline database.

If I do take this private, it’ll be a stripped down HTML-only version.

Stay tuned.

Reset

Sure, the domain name is the same but the platform and the design are all new. The previous Ghost server was very proprietary and will not allow an easy way to export all of my writings there. Nor would it allow me to import decades worth of work into it. So, it had to go away even though I am taking a lo$$ on it. Because why write there when I cannot export?

I have imported the archives here from the previous years but not all of it. I still need to cut/paste from the former platform onto here. Grr.

This site design is a fresh, minimal look and inspired by the Mercedes F1 team colors.

This website is not complete and it will take a few days for everything to be up to my standards.

In the meantime, welcome! Have a look around. Let me know what you think in the comments after each post or from the “About” page.

Why?

Why write publicly? I’ve asked myself this question at least once a year, and my answer gets easier every year—no one cares.

Writing, for me, is a tool to organize my thoughts and process them. It’s also a log for me to remember and look back on to see how I’ve progressed over the years. But writing is a lonely hobby. If there is a limited audience, then what is the point? Put it into an email or a text message and be done with it, right?

Writing online with my domain, my website, and a server can be expensive. It doesn’t have to be, but I choose this over a third-party host and give up all of my rights, privacy, and autonomy.

Social media is not an option for those same reasons.

Social internet is an answer, but it takes too much time to build.

The hardest part of blogging, sharing my passions or thoughts, doesn’t always mean the people closest to you care to read them. Then the doubt creeps in, “Well, if they don’t care, why would anyone else? Why am I doing this, and putting myself out there?”

So, I do what I always do, which is to write for me first, and just hope that maybe someone else might find something of value in there. But over time I just became so frustrated with it all, I am going to close my website down and just go back to journaling for a while.

Attempting to build a web page on this site dedicated to creative writing and the format is failing. Hmm. Create a separate subdomain?

Website Refresh

Aaaaand to ring in the new year I have done a little redecorating to the website by adding new layouts, fonts and colors. The colors are lifted inspired by the Mercedes Formula 1 team colors

#111111

#C6C6C6

#00A19C

Site Health

I spent some time cleaning up this website with the backend protocols, database and overall performances. It is streamlined and ready for the new year which is great because I plan on tweaking some more coding and giving it a fresh coat of paint soon.

Archives

Well shit. I have imported most of the old blog posts onto this database but there seems to be a gap from February 2022 to October 2023. Over a year’s worth of notes. Thankfully I have them backed up but do I want to cut/paste into new posts and backdate them?

No, but I will, and not soon. Too much going on at the moment.

For now, the Archives can be found at the top or by clicking here.

Currently

In addition to adding a page dedicated to the FoxCast, I added a “Currently” page.

This page is dedicated to this month’s quick thoughts and frequently updated as soon as possible. It is an ethereal experiment that will disappear in place of the next month’s thoughts in short form. Think Twitter but anti-social. I just erased October’s thoughts and added November. Not a lot on there…currently, as the month just started.

If you want to know what’s on my mind1, check out the Currently page.

  1. I know I do! ↩︎

FoxOS

I just successfully migrated all of my digitized notes into a new personal database which I used to call “Grey Matter” as a second brain, or pensieve. A second brain is a system where I can collect, refine and process ideas that hopefully will lead to future insights or research.

It’s like adding additional RAM memory to your own brain to help me connect and visualize my thoughts. Every note is linked to another and if there is a general topic such as, photography, it creates a node for other notes to connect or backlink to.

Now that my clean slate initiative is almost complete and have removed my personal name offline, I’ve renamed the database as The Fox Operating System or simply FoxOS.