28.8.01

A Person's Most Private Place

"A diary is like a person's most private place! I... You don't even know what I
was writing about!"
-- Buffy, "Angel"

So I decided I should keep a journal.

I also decided that it should be uber-low maintenance, because anything requiring additional coding or debugging or even imagination on my part --- and God knows I have really no aptitude for any of the above --- would mean that this journal would never make it beyond an idea that exists on my hard drive. So I'm not even making a graphic for the banner frame above [Ed: Obviously that top frame *shudder* no longer exists in this incarnation] and thank God for Dreamweaver and its preset framesets.

I furthermore decided -- in the spirit of all things BtVS-inspired on my website -- to hunt up an old quote from the first season of BtVS which rather accurately sums up the paradoxical nature of web journals, even though it was written in 1997, viz.:

  • A diary is ostensibly a person's most private place.
  • A diary (aka journal) published and updated on the web cannot offer any such assurance of privacy.
  • People who read diaries published on the web usually don't know what the author is writing about because the whole purpose of web journals seems to be to lure people you'd never otherwise meet in person to become enthralled by and addicted to accounts of your wholly mundane life.

Nevertheless, here we are in an age where online journals are thriving across the uncontrollable vastness of the web.
The main reason I'm keeping this journal is because I know loads of people who do and I feel I ought to return them the favor. We'll see how it takes.

PS: The reason this is not a LiveJournal is that I'm already paying for my own domain name, so I might as well have my own private site. Besides, LiveJournal is frankly too successful for its own good -- which means that most of the time when I try to read my friends' pages (paid or free), the server doesn't respond. Best wishes to LJ in its upgrading of servers and best wishes to me in my attempt at writing with the consistency of my LJ friends.

Tym [Ed: Okay, I used to sign off with my real name, but I don't with Tym Blogs Too, so I'm going to edit all references thereof to 'Tym'.]
who signs off with her real name because she's not planning to publicize this page, so if you're not actually a friend of hers and wound up reading some of this garble anyways, please drop her a line [Ed: Email address removed to elude spamdevils] so she knows and can marvel further at the power of the Internet. (Not even at a journal entry yet, and I'm already talking about myself in the third person.)

1 Comments:

At 3/05/2005 12:04 PM , Blogger Agagooga said...

And you bothered to put in editor's notes that probably no one would ever read.

Well, hey, I'm reading them now. Hello to you too!

Looks like we started our online journals at around the same time, hmm (well, you started 2 weeks after me).

Oh, for the glory days.

 

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