Memory Lane, Freshly Paved
So awhile ago I undertook the daunting task of migrating all my joyfulthing.diaryland.com entries over to Wishville. I found a tool that claimed to export diaryland archives into movable-type friendly format, but it fell short of expectations and simply output a text file with all the entries lumped together inside. All 200-something entries.
Little by little I began adding them into Wishville. It was an enormous undertaking. After I'd added about 20% of them, I hit my bandwidth quota with my host. Every time I made changes to my template and tried to rebuild the site, I got blocked by my ISP.
This complicated switching to my new template, which I was quite proud of and wanted to apply immediately. So I removed all the joyfulthing entries and stored them elsewhere.
Voila! I've finally completed the creation of the Archives of Joy. I archived entries by month and by category. The only entries that are not completely represented are the photo category, because I can't find the photos. They're floating in the ether somewhere, and I'm sure they'll turn up.
It was a blast reading some of this dusty material. It felt like visiting with an old friend I hadn't seen in awhile and forgot how much I enjoyed. My rabid obsession with music was refreshing. For a multitude of reasons I've gotten away from shows and even new albums. I used to go to 3 shows a week. I mean, I moved to Seattle because of the music scene! Energies ebb and flow, and mine have been focused elsewhere as of late. That's okay. But remembering how elated I used to get over hearing a song I loved on the radio re-ignited me. And here, as I'm writing this, DevotchKa's "This Place is Haunted" comes on the air and I'm frozen, covered with goosebumps. Larry's Lounge is on KEXP -- the show I was listening to the first time I heard DevotchKa, driving in my car, and I had to pull over to the side of the road to listen to it. Through tears, I wrote down the time so I could go home and pull it up on the online playlist.
I moved in September and I've finally got internet access again. It's one of those irritating things with moving that you have to sort out -- getting Joe Cable to come install stuff, missing work, waiting around, you know how it goes. But now I've got this mad connection ("blazing speeds" Comcast calls it...) so I can return to regularly scheduled updates.
I've missed being here. I've got lots to fill you in on, so I best get started.
Lunch first. More to follow.
