Marking Time

Lest it seems that I just caught onto this blogging fad yesterday, here is proof otherwise. I’ve been blogging since as far back as 2002. Am I ahead of the curve or what? It’s interesting for me (but not for too many others, I imagine) to look back at that time and see the events unfolding as it slowly dawned on me that my life wasn’t going anywhere fast and that it was time to pack my little ruckensacken and move on.

There’s a gap of about a year between the end of that blog and the start of this one. During that time I had no Internet access apart from Internet cafes but I kept an intermittent log off-line during that time. I suppose it’s stating the obvious but a log or diary is a really useful tool for gathering and ordering your ideas and really getting to know yourself. Single entries that often seem trivial at the time take on greater meaning in the context of a larger narrative. You start to see patterns emerging and you ask yourself questions like: ‘Am I really like that?‘,’Did I really feel like that at the time?‘ or, if you have a memory like mine ‘Did I really do that?‘

I’ve also tried my hand at a bit of amateur journalism and published some articles on the excellent Castlebar website. I know I’m biased -it’s my home town after all- but I do think it’s an almost perfect example of how a location-based community site should be run.

Yesterday I ordered a webspace package from YRHost and it was set up today. Then I bought the domain name markingtime.org and I have just installed the MovableType weblogging application.

It went a lot smoother than I thought it would. So far I’m happy with the whole thing. The hosting costs $25 per year and offers php, perl, mysql and a host of other features. The user interface is nice too. Registering the domain name cost me $8.49 which isn’t much either.

Let’s see what I can do with it all.