3/18/2011, 9:15 PM
Back in 2009, I moved all of this blog's posts, up to the start of 2005, over to Suburban Eschatology Pt. 2 on LiveJournal. Today, I mostly finished the process. I finished the process of killing this blog.
Originally, I intended to move everything. I wanted, in essence, to gut this thing and to start over from scratch here. However, a couple things happened to change that. I wanted to empty out this blog so I could re-purpose it. Today, I think I stumbled on that purpose.
On Facebook, I've been posting a "Photo of the Day" for a little over a month now and, recently, I started using Picasa to edit my photography. It is the best editor I have available right now (sorry, no Photoshop at home, nor any Adobe tools). Picasa is a Google product, and Blogger was acquired by Google a few years ago, so they link up nicely and the editor has a one-click posting tool. So, it just makes sense, because it is easy, to click that button every morning and to start shooting my Facebook photo onto Rubble as well. This morning I was able to work some kinks out of my system and I was able to do that for the first time today.
This event is actually what inspired me to put the final bullet into the old blog today. If I was going to start using it again, I thought it was damn well time to finish the job I started in 2009. Besides, as I start the search for my next writing contract, I am looking at cleaning up and streamlining my web presence, so finishing this job was on my to-do list anyway.
So, as I was copying and deleting five plus years worth of posts today, I stumbled on the poetry from 2005 that I posted on here. That year I was taking a couple of Desktop Publishing/In Design classes at Portland State University and my project for the second term was to put together a book of my poetry and photography. While working on that, I wrote quite a few new poems. It was really the only productive time I've had when it comes to creative writing since 2000. But, re-reading these poems today for the first time in a long time, I liked them. I decided to leave them here.
So it clicked… I wrote them for a project involving my creative writing and my photography, so why not dedicate this site to those purposes? It seems like a no brainer.
Of course, while I have a novel length writing project I am working on right now, I have very little else going on these days in the creative writing department, and that novel is still a long ways from seeing the light of day. While it is a goal of mine to get some more creative writing projects going in the near future, for the near future, the content of the new Rubble will mostly be my photography, I suspect.
Which is very amusing to me, since for several years, 2004 through to 2008, I mostly used this blog to post photography. This was my primary, personal blog for several years but at some point, around 2004, I drifted over to LiveJournal. I liked the privacy and networking features there better for my personal stuff, primarily being able to lock down certain posts for "friends" only. For a personal journal, LiveJournal, at the time, was the better option.
However, in 2008, due to being out of work due to health issues, I could not afford to keep the website where I hosted the pictures I had posted to Rubble, so they all blinked away into the ether leaving behind years worth of red Xs. That was, essentially, the death of this blog, it is when it was declared to be a terminal patient. In 2009, I started a Facebook account and that became the primary depository of my photos, so this site was pretty much abandoned and that is when I started the process of actually dismantling it.
While consolidating all of my personal blog posts into one journal made perfect sense, it was still sad, to me, that it ended up being the new blog that survived and Rubble that died, since I started this blog in 2001. It is amazing to me to realize that this blog will be a decade old in a couple months. It is older than my youngest son. My earliest post on Blogger was on July 12, 2001 when I posted the following:
My old service seems to have gone nipples up on me. You can view my old postings here. Soon, I will use my magic box that does the spooky work of the devil to create something interesting with this space. Until then, please visit my site, Rubble.
Before that, my primary blog was on a now long dead service called GrokSoup, though I am not sure that the word blog even existed when I started that one [weblog (web-log) did]. That blog was also called Rubble, and this blog was really a continuation of that one when it died. So, essentially, this blog is really 11 or 12 years old. Unfortunately, all of the posts from back then died with GrokSoup. Today, I found a decent little blog post on the history of that site, written by its creator. (http://paul.kedrosky.com/archives/2004/08/09/groksoup_and_th.html)
Reading that article is amusing, it reminds me that I have been blogging, on and off, forever. I was one of the first, a veritable pioneer. Many others from back then went on to do great things. Me, not so much… I've been frying other fish since then.
Bygones… Anyway, I have three blogs now, and they are all clearly defined for the first time in years. My personal journal at LiveJournal, where I can whine and bitch and moan. I also use that one as the home base, so to speak, for my Facebook notes. It has useful tools for cross-posting. Soon, the posts I removed from Rubble today will appear over there, posted to their original dates.
Rubble, this blog, will be primarily dedicated to creative output. This does not just mean fiction, poetry, and photography. I may put up some essays and what not here as well. In fact, there is one essay that I left posted here already.
Democracy In Distress, that long neglected blog dating back to George W. Bush's re-election in 2004, will still be there for political writing, though I want to eventually steer it more towards a discussion about media issues. That blog, though, may be dormant for quite some time. It's been several years since I've had any time or energy to focus on politics or the media. For a long time, I was just too angry to type (you can't type with fists), and then I just became too tired and jaded, burned out… But the blog is still there if I ever need it. I even have a bulletin board set up for it, though I do not know if that is still functional or not.
Many things have changed over the years. The Rubble and Democracy In Distress blogs used to support websites with the same (or similar) names. These are long gone now, but the blogs remain. Someday I may set up a new website to use as a portal to all my blogs and to the other corners of the internet that I hang out on, but I do not see doing this anytime in the near future.
So, yes. Rubble Blog is dead. Long live Rubble Blog… But Rubble Blog is reborn. Welcome to Rubble.
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