I have stumbled on a backup dump of my blog from my ‘Tumblr years’. It brought back quite a few memories from those, and yet earlier days, having first started blogging sometime in 2004.

The early blog was called ‘The Whole is Less than the Sum of the Parts’ (which I recall was a reflection on my experience working on free software). I blogged there with varied, and rather sporadic, frequency until October 2007; around this time I joined Twitter, which suited me much better than a full-blown blog.

That first blog got only one more post after that, in April 2010, entitled ‘Why I am not on Facebook’. Some of the posts from this blog can be found on the wayback machine, but much has been lost to time (the site was only crawled in 2009 and 2010).

[I have now managed to squeeze a bit more out of the wayback machine, and it turns out while I didn’t blog at all in 2008, in 2009 the blog got renamed to ‘By a Desolate Stream’ (which I recall was a dig at our, i.e., the OpenedHand bunch, experience working at Intel), and I blogged there through to June 2012. There are at least a couple of posts from that period that might be worth resurecting.]

I then used Tumblr from 2013 to early 2017. It’s mostly reposts of my Flickr images and inane content from elsewhere on Tumblr, with some mix of mostly tech stuff, and some running bits.

Then in 2015 I setup the current blog, initially it was meant to be dedicated to hill running and outdoors stuff (with a subtitle of ‘Runs Less Epic’), but it gradually came full circle in 2017 again to be my only, general purpose, blog.

I was blogging again fairly regularly through to 2022, but 2023 saw only a single post; at this point I was finding my way around Mastodon, wondering if it could be what the early Twitter was. I picked up the blog again this year, mostly as my disillusionment with the social media, including Mastodon grew again.

Looking through the Tumblr dump that sparked this, there are a few posts in there I am going to import back into this blog for their historical and/or personal significance, and I might even see if there is anything worthy scraping from the original blog on the wayback machine too, not least the already mentioned final post (a few of the more substantial pieces at the time I turned into PDFs, and there is a chance I still have those somewhere). It is certainly interesting to compare my writing and thinking today to that of ten and twenty years ago (I might do a more critical postmortem on that at some point too).