Over Twenty Years of Writing Tools

"On my [articles page](/articles), you can read near the top that I've been writing for the past 20 years (plus a little more). It's not all my online public writing, but it's a majority of it. The primary reason parts are missing is that over time, I've used a variety of tools to publish my thoughts. Some of those tools were hosted services, and material that was lost was because of services being shut down."

"In 1997, I first remember writing something for general publication on the web. Until then, my writings had been transmitted by printing paper, hand-copying onto disks, sending by email, or posting to usenet. I think it was in 1997 that I made my first essay-style writing on [GeoCities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoCities) site I put together. Geocities is gone, but periodically I've thought of digging through GeoCities archives to find my writing from that time between 1997 and 2004. Otherwise, those articles are gone."

"From 2004 to 2009, I used LiveJournal to put down my thoughts, and there I wrote on a regular basis about life, activities, fitness, coding, and general work stuff. When I revisit those posts, I see some fun things, some hard challenges, and between the lines a lot carefully hidden despair. The few articles that made it onto this site capture extended family memories. [Some of the articles from LiveJournal exist here](https://daniel.feldroy.com/tags/legacy-livejournal)."

Over more than twenty years of online publishing, multiple tools and services were used to create and host posts. Hosted platforms sometimes shut down, causing permanent loss of published content and incomplete archives. Early personal pages appeared on GeoCities (1997–2004) and some material may survive in GeoCities archives, while other items are gone. From 2004 to 2009, LiveJournal hosted regular posts on life, activities, fitness, coding, and work, with a few entries migrated that capture extended family memories. A later shift to blogging platforms began around 2007. The long-term solution favored Markdown files stored in a Git repository rather than database-backed hosted services.

Read at https://daniel.feldroy.com