Change Is Hard

…but change is certain.


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Paper vs digital

I’ve been blogging since September 2006, when I was in grad school and a fellow student was putting together a host something or other to support people’s blogs. My first post was about writing an assignment for one of my classes.

I didn’t know what a blog was back then, but I liked to write, and I thought the blog would be a good place to put my thoughts about going back to school as a middle aged student. Now I read some of my oldest posts and think …. man, those were good (and sometimes bad) days.

It was all a new experience for me, being a student again, and I enjoyed almost all of it. Riding the city bus, hanging out with people half my age. Experiencing new things. Just being in Ann Arbor.

And then the blog morphed, especially after I graduated, and even more after I retired.

Now it’s more of a photo blog, a pet blog, a travel blog (when I’m lucky), a family blog. Sometimes a not anything in particular blog.

And here’s my dilemma. The blog is huge. There are months missing because when I transferred it to WordPress some months didn’t come on over…but overall it’s still huge. I pay a fee every year to keep it going because I’ve used so much storage. Someday I won’t pay that fee any more. Then what?

In library school we talked often about how technology is a double edged sword. That as it changes the ability to access the information changes. That we have paper documents and art from centuries ago, but someday soon people won’t be able to access things on floppy discs or thumb drives because there won’t be hardware left that anyone knows how to use.

Yet paper lives on.

I’m not thinking that stuff on my blog needs to be preserved for decades, but I would like to read it when I’m old, which is at least a couple decades from now. In particular I’d like to be able to read about Katie.

So I’m thinking about researching a way to print the blog posts about her. She was over 15 years old, so there are quite a few. If you remember, she was a prolific writer.

And if that works I might want to print the posts about going to school as a middle aged student. That was an extraordinary experience. There were fewer, if any, pictures in those, so they might transfer to some sort of paper document easier.

I don’t know.

I always have these ideas and then I get discouraged trying to figure out solutions. So if you’ve read my wandering words this far and you have knowledge of some way to print blog posts, let me know your ideas!