I started blogging in 2003. Back then my blog was called Between the Lines, and then it became Palaverist. Along the way, I had spinoff blogs: UNist, μ (sic), This Is Not a Sentence. In 2013, I finally came around to just using my own name.
It took some work, but I’ve now imported all of these blogs into joshphilipross.com. Importing from Blogger was pretty simple, but my earliest blogs were hosted on Angelfire, which is still around but lacks an export function. I had to copy and paste those blog entries one at a time, but they’re all here now, accessible through the Archive dropdown on the left side of this blog.
Fifteen years of posts
There are 1201 entries. This one will be 1202. That’s about one entry every four days for fifteen years, but of course they’re not evenly distributed like that. I didn’t post anything at all in 2012. My most prolific period was 2004 to 2006, when I was working (or not working) at a terrible marketing job, and then at the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Korea to the UN, where I had a lot of free time. Also, that was before Facebook and Twitter, so links and one-offs that now land on social media were blog fodder in those days. The internet was a lot more primitive back then: I ran across the blog posts from when I discovered YouTube and Google Calendar, and there was no Wikipedia, no Urban Dictionary, no streaming music services. We bloggers did a lot of hand curating links back then.
A lot of those links are dead now. The old blog posts are a kind of record of what once existed on the web. I did a little cleanup, but not much. If the image is gone or the link is broken, that’s more or less that.
There’s an awful lot in all those posts. Some of what I said kind of embarrasses me now; not every hot take is a smart take. A few posts struck me as still pretty good. I’ll try to repost things to the front page from time to time, when they’re relevant or the mood strikes me. For now, it’s nice just to have it all in one place.