I’ve been blogging since before the word blogging existed. In the late 1990s and early 2000s I learned HTML and created a website where I regularly wrote about what was going on in my life. I found a wonderful network of other women who did the same thing and we all linked to each other’s sites and read each other’s writing and I felt like I knew them. When the Blogger app became widely available in 2003 (before we even used the word app in regular conversation), suddenly it was even easier to create websites and share all of my thoughts on the internet, for better or worse.
I maintained various blogs and websites pretty consistently from 1998 through about 2018, but as my work life got more time consuming, and the blogging world got oversaturated, I wrote and shared less and less, and sometime during the pandemic, I missed a payment to my hosting service and all of my various sites disappeared from the internet.
I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to restore them without needing to maintain multiple different domains, and I finally, finally, finally got some of the content back up. Some of it is really lost forever. And what I did manage to salvage from backups is posted now as a shell of what it used to be. Many of the images and photographs that I shared are lost, which is a huge bummer. But I hope that I can find pockets of time in the future, here and there, to work on restoring some of what I have.
Two of the blogs that I used to maintain are now re-created as subdomains of this site, and they are linked in the top menu. The Kitchen Illiterate is a food blog that I wrote from 2007 until 2014. There was a time when I thought about really trying to make a go of becoming a professional food writing and photographer, and that feels like a lifetime ago. But there are still some good recipes there, so I thought it was worth restoring, if only for myself. laurapants is another blog I created in 2012 and wrote in until about 2014. It was mostly focused on sewing, beauty, and more personal topics. This is the one that no longer has any of the associated images. Wahhh!
There were a few others that I wrote in at various times: we had a wedding website, and a website focused on the remodeling of our house, and I started another food blog at one point that was about cooking and meal planning for one. That stuff is just gone, unless I can somehow unearth backups on my hard drive somewhere.
Part of me is deeply saddened that the work of so many years is gone because of my own carelessness. But another part of me feels like…maybe it’s just fine. It’s good to be reminded sometimes that things can be impermanent.
Now the real feat would be finding my first ever website if it’s still out there on the internet somewhere. I think it was hosted on Tripod, if you’re old enough to remember that. They say the internet never forgets, so perhaps it lives on, somewhere…