Dipping into the Blogstream

Just about the only thing that I’ve been able to keep up with of late is my work on updating all the old Greymatter blog entries. They were transformed into Drupal format via a nifty script our tech admin wrote, but there were a few glitches, the primary one being that all posts apparently got labeled as being authored by me. So, I’ve been sifting through them, making the following changes as needed: 1] correct authorship; 2] correct URLs referring to previous blog entries; 3] remove the coding that forces clicks to open new windows; and 4] categorizing the entry. It appears from my testing that our search function is heavily dependent upon the category structure.

This might seem like a lot of work, with little benefit to it, but I think it’s important. The site will be internally smooth agan when I’m finished, and will be a more accurate record than it is now of who said what, way back when. My daily goal has been to update ten entries per day, which has been easy to accomplish. At this pace I will be through the entire blog in around three months. (We’re still working on how to handle the nonblog static pages I’d created; and yes, I’m the spanner in the works yet again.)

But of course, when I look at some older entries I see other things I’m tempted to change ... a change of mind about a site I’d featured as a “site of the week” for example, or mentions of sites I know aren’t around any longer. The perfectionist editor in me is never satisfied: and it’s true, sometimes I have removed links or – much more frequently – updated links, especially ones that point to friends’ sites. I’m trying very hard not to change the fundamental nature of any post, but it’s sometimes a challenge ... a bit of awkward phrasing or a misspelling jumps out at me, and my fingers want to “improve” what’s there. But change isn’t necessarily improvement, and I know that under the guise of “cleaning up” lies the murky depths of spin, obfuscation, and the like. I may not like some of the things I’ve written, or how I wrote about them, but I am not interested in reconstructing my past. I do too much of that in my head as is ... it’s inescapable.

Just as William James observed in his comments about dipping into a stream, one never dips into the same blogstream twice. And in dipping into my past – at least as represented here – I realize that there’s no such thing as sufficient hindsight that yields a final, “correct” view.