this april will mark my sixth anniversary of maintaining a blog with five of those being with the recently defunct journalspace. luckily i had most of my entries stored offline as i was trying to migrate them here. there are a lot of people that are not as fortunate.
moving all those entries have allowed me to retag and review some of the stuff i posted over the years. it gives me a very big brother feel, deciding which portions of my history i want presented. although with the ubiquitousness of the google cache, i’m sure even the portions that are not being reposted can be found somewhere. currently, i’m adding and editing entries from july 2004, including search for and ultimate success in finding a job. with the benefit of hindsight, i wonder if i was that anxious to do have a job that i completely misread the situation or as i continue to move, i’ll find the point where things all started to go wrong.
the other thing that the journalspace failure has solidified in my mind, aside from the need for frequent and reliable backups, is the need to have control of my own content. it’s easy to let someone else do all the hard work, but what happens when it becomes too much trouble, too expensive or too impractical to maintain or change the terms of service at random? journalspace is not the first provider to close it’s doors nor will they be the last. one of my objectives for 2009 is to host all my online digital content myself or at least have copies hosted here. it’s never going to be as slick as flickr or .mac and i’m never going to have all the features that those services provide, but at least it will all be mine.
