This blog began in 1998 as a diary of significant events in my life targeted at the people who care about me. Early on I was lucky enough to have access to a digital camera, so much of the news included photos. At first it was just a thumbnail included with the news but soon I was constructing whole web pages that served as mini photo albums. Eventually, I installed the Rynosoft Gallery for family pictures and created a Flickr account for other pictures.
In 2000 I started supplementing the news with milestones documenting my current reading and listening habits. Eventually, I added other categories and soon these “vital statistics” became too large to include with news updates so I began posting them separately. All though they may seem trivial to most, they subtly describe my current mentality and serve as a reference point for me when I look backwards through them.
In addition to news and vital statistics, I began posting links and writing about other things that interested me although these were usually computer-related. Pieces that were longer than a paragraph were usually posted as stand-alone articles on my website and not as part of the news (examples: On the Birth of my Second Son, Album Reviews). I also embarked on an a number of projects that would be best described as “web projects” where writing was not as central to the delivery of information (examples: Rain Calendar, Family Tree).
At the end of the 2005 I switched from editing straight HTML to posting via standard “blogging” software. This decision really freed me in a couple of ways. For one, I was no longer tied to a single computer where the “source” HTML files for my blog were kept. Now I could post from anywhere that there was a computer with an internet connection. More importantly, I eventually felt freer to write about any topic that I desired on my blog. Because posts can remain unpublished for any length of time, I could also dash together notes on a topic for later exposition without devoting all my time to it immediately. The result is that I now write on a number of seemingly disparate topics but all of them are the sum of my intellectual being.