Life and times of Jason since 2001
August 7, 2001
In a pre-September 11th, pre-Gmail, pre-smartphone, pre-social media, pre-YouTube, pre-Tesla, pre-COVID, pre-alotofthings world, 22 year old Jason started a blog.
That’s nuts.
The world has changed. The web has changed. I have changed. (I mean, all of that could go unsaid I guess…)
Sure, it’s been on-and-off and sometimes more meaty than others, but it’s still here.
Let’s take a trip down memory lane. Ladies and gents, a wee bit of the internet of 2001!
Every time you post something you’re proud of on a social media site, how about taking a moment and posting it to your blog too. And while there, if appropriate, link to something from some part of your post, even though the social media sites don’t support linking, the web is still there and it still does.
On living the dream
Yesterday this ol’ blog turned 22. Sure, it’s ignored most of the time and is a little dusty and rusty and maybe its best days are behind it, but it’s a reflection of me and my life in so many ways so it’s still special.
Not sure what about life happens to get in the way of things like writing. Yes, events, family, work, kids, etc etc. But it’s odd how I have the least amount of time to write during the years I’m going to want to remember the most.
All the stuff before, the first 8-10 years of J’s Notes, they’re not nothing but they certainly don’t reflect the life of a guy truly living a life beyond his wildest dreams. Two amazing kids, a good job, a nice house, more animals than I know what do do with, an incredible wife because, dang, y’all, I married up!
Life is good. Maybe I can just say I’m focusing on living it instead of focusing on journaling it, the memories will count. Not just mine but those of my boys, my best friend and rock and partner, my family.
It’s a good place to be. But it’s nice to make note of it once in a while.
As I dig through and repost the archives of J’s Notes I’m finding a ton of dead links because twenty plus years is a LOOOOOONG time on the Internet and things go away. But thanks to the Wayback Machine you can find a lot of lost digital history with a quick search. But cut and pasting each link into a search is tedious, so maybe there’s a way to shortcut with a bookmark that has a little code to do the work for me.
So let’s ask ChatGPT!
After a little tweaking, some testing, minor back and forth with ChatGPT, and a total of 15 minutes, the following code did the trick:
javascript:(function() {
var currentUrl = window.location.href;
window.open('https://web.archive.org/web/*/' + currentUrl, '_blank');
})();To use:
Sure, I probably could have just Googled this, but even some of those answers didn’t work when testing afterwards. And using ChatGPT and working through the process helped me learn a thing or two about life, love, and javascript. It got the process started a lot quicker than if I’d tried to do this from scratch and I was able to get to iteration right away.
And this is where I think the true value of ChatGPT is (right now at least). Rough first drafts that you can then edit and build off of and make your own. I wouldn’t recommend it for “original” content — because it’s not original, it’s aggregated and filtered from other people’s work — but for non-proprietary work or learning the basics of something it can go a long way to saving some time and effort.
I think I come back here every January to say “I’m gonna be better about updating J’s Notes this year!” And it works for a few weeks.
But I’m going to be better about updating J’s Notes this year. Just you wait and see.
I posted a thread on Twitter and then thought, heck, that’s a blog post!
As I continue to cull through old J’s Notes posts to reshare on the current site I run into the moral quandary of not just choosing what I don’t want to reshare, but how much I should edit what I do reshare.
For the first, sure, it’s kinda dishonest for me to hide some of the things I proudly shared in the last 20 years but I’ve grown, become better informed, a better writer (in some areas), and generally don’t necessarily have the same tastes as I did in my mid-20s.
For the second, I’m torn on how much I should “clean up” past content or just let is live as a historical document of, wow, I really messed up my grammar or used “pisses me off” a lot as a youngin’.
If I do edit, do I owe the potential reader any notation on what may have been edited? Does degree of editing matter? Am I overthinking it?
This is ultimately for me, I don’t think anyone out there is going to wonder what I thought about random links I found interesting in June of 2003 other than me, and I’ll always have the archive to embarrass myself with.
Also, anything I don’t include is probably available to anyone with a medium degree of internet sleuthing because nothing on the internet is private and everything is forever to a degree so I’m not protecting myself from future dirt digging (if needed).
This is also a hidden process, I could do nothing and no one would know, but the whole point of blogging for 20 years has been a certain degree of oversharing.
So it’s really about what do I want to continue to embrace and have my name attached to.
I don’t really owe anyone anything when it comes to my website’s content, but as someone with a general interest in history I think about what I would want to see if I dug into something like this.
Aritha van Herk had an good, thought provoking response:
And I’m ultimately torn on this – I like seeing history evolve and show that change, but we also live in an era where we give very little room for someone to grow as a person over the course of a lifetime, let alone a decade or so.
Curating is one thing, all history is curated, we don’t have a record of every moment of every thing, but editing is a different beast.
If history is edited, is it really history?
I’m not editing to hide anything, really, but even curating at this point is really editing an already existing historical record.
Chris O’Donnell, with one of the few active blogs I can think of that pre-date J’s Notes, added:
And the changed beliefs is the big thing, but does killing it off look like whitewashing?
I’m also probably being waaaaaay too generous to myself to think that I’ll ever be of any import that my past thoughts are going to matter one way or another.
Twenty years is a long time by any standard, but for the internet it’s downright ancient.
It seems a little unnecessary to say it’s been an eventful twenty years because, over the course of twenty years, yeah, there’s gonna be some things happening, both personally and globally.
Every now and then I kill some time digging through the J’s Notes archives of nearly 4,000 posts made before 2011 and I’m astounded by a few things:
The first three kinda run together and makes sense – as one grows they ideally hone their craft (whatever it may be) and how they use it changes as they do. J’s Notes used to be my social media platform where I shared everything I was finding interesting before Facebook and Twitter came along. It was a lot more political when I was. It was a lot more personal when I needed it to be.
J’s Notes was also a catalyst for so much of my life. I turned an interest in weblogging/blogging into an interest in New Media that transitioned into Social Media and getting a reputation for knowing a thing or two about this stuff – which allowed me to turn it into a career.
I’ve made a lot of friends thanks to this too. Like, real world, off-line friends. Heck, I met my wife because of this stuff.
So there’s a certain degree of nostalgia and memories that keeps J’s Notes limping along – certainly more than my inability to throw anything away (I have t-shirts older than J’s Notes).
I’ll be shocked if I’m here again twenty years from now saying “woah, 40 years already?!!” but 2001 Jason wouldn’t have expected to be here now writing this.
Here’s to 20 years of shouting into the darkness of the interwebs!
For many, blogging is essentially a personal journal – public diary that strangers can stumble across but that’s OK because if we didn’t want strangers to stumble across it we wouldn’t have put it out there. There are of course varying degrees to this personal journaling with some people more or less putting it all out there, ugly warts and all, and often including the assorted characters in their lives in the stories, often without real names being changed to protect the innocent.
As social media and the assorted platforms have grown and evolved, there has been an on going debate on how much is too much when it comes to “sharenting,” especially as folks have turned the life and times of their children into incomes. It’s only over the last few years that the subjects of many of these stories are coming of age and finding out just how much of their private lives weren’t so private.
Christie Tate, lawyer, writer, mother of two children, came face to face with this this past Christmas when her fourth-grade daughter received a new laptop and did what people do: searched the names of those she loved.
“What’s all this?” she said. The screen was covered with thumbnail sketches of her as a baby, a toddler and preschooler — each paired with an essay or blog post I’d written on the subject of parenting. “Why are all of these pictures of me on the Internet?” She wanted to know, and she had a right to know
I’ve tried to be respectful of my children’s lives on social media. My personal accounts where most of their photos are shared are private. The stories I share are moments of joy and curiosity, the highlights of our moments together. I’m not about to pull back the curtain on the nitty gritty details of their lives because, quite frankly, it’s either no one’s business but my family’s or it’s not my story to tell.
That said, if one of my children came to me in the future and said they had a problem with what I had shared, my immediate response would be an apology, a hard stop, and to work with them on how we remove it and turn it into a life lesson for both of us on the permanence of the web and responsible usage. Because as a parent that’s my job.
So this bothers me:
Promising not to write about her anymore would mean shutting down a vital part of myself, which isn’t necessarily good for me or her. So my plan is to chart a middle course, where together we negotiate the boundaries of the stories I write and the images I include. This will entail hard conversations and compromises. But I prefer the hard work of charting the middle course to giving up altogether — an impulse that comes, in part, from the cultural pressure for mothers to be endlessly self-sacrificing on behalf of their children. As a mother, I’m not supposed to do anything that upsets my children or that makes them uncomfortable, certainly not for something as culturally devalued as my own creative labor.
…
My daughter didn’t ask to have a writer for a mother, but that’s who I am. Amputating parts of my experience feels as abusive to our relationship as writing about her without any consideration for her feelings and privacy.
Words. I have none.
OK, I do have some (clearly, I’m writing a whole post here, afterall) but I think Waldo Jaquith nailed it in his tweet here:
This woman is teaching her daughter to only share things with her mother that she’d want published for the whole world to read. She has permanently poisoned her relationship with her child.
And then she went and wrote about *that* in the Post, too.
Are there cultural pressures for a mother (and father, to be honest) to self-sacrifice on behalf of their children? Yes, it’s called being a parent. That doesn’t devalue anyone’s creative labors, in fact, it provides different opportunities to be creative. It’s a challenge to be embraced, not pushed aside because it’s difficult or requires a sacrifice.
Cory Doctorow says that reports of blogging’s death are greatly exaggerated. Content’s just finding more appropriate mediums.
When all we had was the stage, every performance was a play. When we got films, a great lot of these stories moved to the screen, where they’d always belonged (they’d been squeezed onto a stage because there was no alternative). When TV came along, those stories that were better suited to the small screen were peeled away from the cinema and relocated to the telly. When YouTube came along, it liberated all those stories that wanted to be 3-8 minutes long, not a 22-minute sitcom or a 48-minute drama. And so on.
What’s left behind at each turn isn’t less, but more: the stories we tell on the stage today are there not because they must be, but because they’re better suited to the stage than they are to any other platform we know about. This is wonderful for all concerned – the audience numbers might be smaller, but the form is much, much better.
Blogging didn’t kill traditional websites, it just provided a new and easier way to push content quickly for those who wanted to. As Facebook and Twitter came along, some found that these services filled the need that blogging had to in the past since that was the best choice available at the time. Future services won’t kill Twitter or FB but will peel away users as these services better fit what users want for their content. Those left behind are those who find the tools best suited to what they need, and those are the people who will use them best.
Testing out blogging with the Pre and seeing how images upload. This is Pantera.