I started this blog in 2005 on Blogger with a dot blogspot address. The first digital archive of the renamed site, DigitalPapercuts.com, is from March 2007. While history gets fuzzy here, even the archive of that site has a re-direct to my first WordPress site with the cringe-worthy tagline: Things that sting your flesh for just an instant and fade away. Yet the digital evidence remains.
It appears that I posted to that site until 2011. The last post on that site summarized my travel in pictures—in early Instagram style with filters and borders—but it remained somewhat static with no new posts for a while before I migrated the whole thing to my named domain.
The first archived version of jeffreylcohen.com was a photo blog in 2009. While I had secured the domain, it was not yet my blog. It eventually became an introduction site, with links to all of my other properties and profiles. It was a thing for social media types like me. The first archived appearance of my blog at my named domain was 2013. I had long ago transitioned my online identity from DigitalPapercuts to my name, so it was definitely time to move the blog.
Over the next few years I dabbled in travel posts about trips to Alaska and Mt Kilimanjaro, but things really changed on this blog in the fall of 2016 when I began my near-daily observation posts. These thoughts, observations, dreams could be a sentence, a paragraph or longer, but it was just one simple idea. An online journal for ideas to be resurrected later in my literary novel. You want metaphors for life, I got 'em. These short posts now make up more than half of this site's 2,500 posts.
All of the posts since the beginning have followed this journey—complete with broken links, unloading images and the early online arrogance of a social media (insert noun here)—and they have arrived at a new destination.
I was tired of my self-hosted WordPress site. Plug-ins, updates, too much technical overhead for a site that is primarily an archive, but needs to support me writing a few sentences each day. So I have moved the whole thing to Ghost. Not the highly technical self-hosted version, but the simple one that they host. The primary things I need are integrated. Does it have limited flexibility? Yep, but that's the point. On my basic plan I can't use the premium themes. It really doesn't matter.
It also follows the latest trends where the model is based on newsletters and memberships—even paid ones—than a straight-up blog. Good to know. Subscribe if you want to, but I'm just here doing what I'm doing.
And because lately everything has to tie back to my mom, in the early days of my blog, she enjoyed it. She'd read posts, comment, print them out—she put my Kilimanjaro post in a notebook—and even chide me about typos or lack of posts. But she did not like my observation posts. She didn't understand them. She didn't know why I wrote them. And even called them stupid.
But it did get worse with her dementia. She didn't understand how I was doing things—these stupid things—inside her computer. And why wasn't I working on paying her bills?
So I'm on a simple platform, writing simple posts. My life is not exciting without travel, but I did get married and we're making plans. Regardless, there's still a lot of stuff that appears either in front of my eyes or behind my eyes. It might make you think, or just tilt your head in wonder. And it's okay if you think some of them are stupid. That puts you in pretty good company.
