Eight Years of SpaceCraft

Never have I been so grateful for drafts! I wrote this post last week while I had the idea in my head. And, today while I lay here recovering from a pretty nasty bout of gastroenteritis, although I’m not sure that there’s a good kind of it!, I’m very glad that all I have to do is click “publish”.

I started this blog eight years ago which now seems incredible to me. I’d had a domain name since 2000 but had never really been able to work out what to do with it. I’d had idle thoughts about having some kind of online science fiction magazine on it and sort of did that for a while. Then the site became dormant. I had thought about  having a blog but wasn’t too sure what I wanted to write about. And then I discovered knitting blogs.

Back in 2002 there were very few knitting blogs. So few in fact that it was possible to read them all in an evening. I was on the Knitting Bloggers webring, and indeed still am, and became friendly with my blogring neighbour Theresa who was in Chicago.

It is really strange going back and reading my archives. I’ve felt a variety of emotions while going back – nostalgia, embarrassment since my writing style has changed over the years. Some things like reading about sock yarn that my late friend Anne gave me and realising that I still haven’t knit it are painful. And some things are a bit weird since I’ve had some major life changes since I began blogging. One of the hardest entries I ever had to write was where I explained about the end of my relationship with Andy. It was difficult because I tended to keep personal stuff out of the blog but people had been asking where I’d gone so I felt I had to explain my disappearance.

And something else – I still have most of the yarn stash I’ve blogged about acquiring. I still have lots of it…

One of the things that I’ve really enjoyed about reading the archives is hearing about some of my past cats. It was so funny seeing this picture of Clyde again.

He looks so indignant wearing that scarf.

Now I guess you might be wondering where some of the older archives are so that you can laugh at my earlier, dorkier stuff. The 2002-2004 ones are currently here but they look dreadful and are sans pictures. The others are over on the left in the sidebar. The blog has lived on a few servers since I began it and I’ve used three different blog platforms – Blogger, Typepad and now WordPress. I’ve been able to export the Typepad entries and comments into WordPress but the email address I used  for the Blogger one is now defunct so I can’t import those entries. Also since I moved servers my old Blogger archives haven’t been behaving very well. All the comments are lost too since Enertation doesn’t appear to exist anymore. Seems weird, doesn’t it, the idea of blog software not having comments already built in but that’s what it was like in 2002. So the archives up until 2004 are quite simplistic at the moment.

My posting has been sporadic over the last few years but I’ve been trying to blog more recently. A lot of that is down to Doug who’s encouraged me to reconnect with it more. I do write many entries in my head. There are also drafts that don’t make the cut. Sometimes I wonder who’s actually reading this but it doesn’t matter. My main reason for writing is for me. Actually when I think of blogging, I think of this from Staceyjoy Elkin’s Red Lipstick Blog-

“Spill Guts Here. It’s gotta go somewhere, know what I mean? Can you stand it?”

And I think that’s what blogging is at its heart. It’s a place to dump, a place to record, a place to remember.

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