A million years ago I started journaling in this space. Is that a verb? It is now. Anyway I didn’t call it blogging. I was suspicious of blogging. But after laboriously hand-coding my updates for some months, I wound up switching to Blogger for publishing purposes, and I guess I’ve been a blogger ever since.
There have been a few hiati. Is that a plural? It is now. Anyway, I didn’t always keep up the frequency of this diary (which was never, despite my best intentions, daily). Every once in a while I’ve gone wandering off into the wilderness without updating for a while, and for a time I made much of those breaks. As if they mattered!
Things have changed. Facebook has largely taken over the role this space used to play in updating my friends and thinking out loud. I’m on Twitter, too, and the little snippets that appear there take over some of this blog’s former functions. This blog has been called Zen Canadiana for a while; but today that aspect of my work is mostly represented by @zencanadiana.
Moreover, for the last two and a half years I’ve been blogging as part of my work at Canoe.ca. The lessons learned here have been applied to The Canoe Dossier, and I’m proud to say that blog was a finalist for Best Blog in the Canadian Online Publishing Awards as a result.
Lately, I’ve been putting some effort into Roots Music Canada as well, and that’s also bearing fruit for me.
So I don’t feel as though I’ve abandoned this space, so much – I’ve just let it grow a little bit wild, and that suits me fine.
This blog has moved to a new publishing platform, the superb WordPress. There will be some tweaks and a new look and feel to follow – seven years of the same colour scheme is enough.
I’d already crammed what was “David’s Diary” and “The Shed Out Back” into one place, and all the songs from the Songbook (aka “Sky Above, Earth Below”) are now posted in the same archive. If I get around to it, I’ll move “Paths of our Paddles” and “Newland’s News” content in here too.
I think in this move comments have been retained, but I know that I lost some in previous migrations. I have hard copies on my desktop. I mention that for posterity’s sake. If you are writing my bio, oh future blog historian, please take note and take appropriate forensic action.
That’s it. This space is still my workshop, though I don’t mess around here as much as I once did. These blurbs are my sketches and this is how I keep my fingers fluid.
I if there’s one thing I’ve learned in nearly seven years of this, it’s that I do this for me first. But if you enjoy it, so much the better.