Spent a couple of hours using MarsEdit to do a long-overdue cleaning up of old posts from the mid-2000s. At that time, I used Tumblr as my digital scrapbook, as Evernote was not really on the scene then.
I was embarrassed that many of those old Tumblr posts appeared on this micro.blog as if I’d written them, without proper sourcing or attribution. So I deleted a lot of those posts, plus many many posts where the source links were 404s or when referring to products or sites that simply don’t exist anymore.
I kept lots of posts that were diary entries marking my path through grad school, quotes, random images – a digital scrapbook I’d enjoy just paging through in my anecdotage.
I always harbored the fugitive idea that I kept stuff on the blog so I could find it again. And it’s true, there are a few things I post here that I do often go back. But honestly, not a lot. I remember switching personal information managers one time and marvelling that all the years of stuff I’d saved out into a big text file I never, ever went back for.
It’s all a river, flowing past us. These posts are souvenirs from past times and places, with more coming our way. Be sure to write a nice note to yourself so that you’ll smile in the future when you see it.