As 2008 draws to a close I’ve been trying to decide what I should do with my photo experiment site A Photo a Day. I started it on January 1st of this year and have been pretty diligent about posting but it’s been a LOT of work. It was originally intended to get me motivated to shoot more. I was working on JPG Magazine by day but wasn’t shooting hardly at all. It actually worked but I still found myself delving into the archives fairly often to keep the site fresh. I have been thinking of shutting it down at the end of the year and handing the reins over to someone else or making a group blog but now that I’ve put in a year of sweat into it I’m finding it pretty impossible to let it go. With that said I’m going to keep doing it myself but I’ll be taking January off to re-vamp the site and port it back over to Wordpress. Pixelpost is the engine I’m using now and it frankly sucks. So I’ll be porting the old content and getting it ready for the new. I want to use WP because the comment filtering is the best in the biz and I really miss having them on. There were automated bots posting thousands of junk comments a day in Pixelpost which made it unusable for comments. And who doesn’t like comments? One thing I haven’t done is post much about the images which I want to do in the new version and maybe spark some chatter as well. I love taking photos and sharing them but without those basic tools it’s a very lonely task and seems more like a chore. So that’s the fate of APAD in a nutshell. This site is another thing altogether. Over the Xmas break I’m going to be revamping my online presence as well which should be fun. It’s been years since I actually gave it any attention and I’ve got some good ideas I want to actually bring to fruition. That’s about it. This year has been one giant bag of suck and I can’t wait for it to be over but after all these years one thing I realize is Jan 1 ain’t a whole lot different from Dec 31.

e•phem•er•al |əˈfem(ə)rəl|
adjective
lasting for a very short time : fashions are ephemeral.

TEMPORARY.
• Having a very short life cycle.

There’s something I’ve always asked for from Twitter and that’s a feature that would only save my last N number of tweets. You see I don’t think that permanence on the internet is actually good for some things. 140 character snapshots of a person’s life are extraordinarily context sensitive and when taken out of context can do more harm than good when trying to re-construct a persona from an outsiders perspective. Blog posts can be seen as the same thing if looked at from a certain angle. In my case they’re generally off the cuff snapshots of my mind at any given slice of time. The process of writing the post often times can change my perspective on a situation rendering even the post I’ve just written obsolete and no longer relevant to who I am. Even this post will have that effect on me. I’m certain of it. I used to tell people the best blog would only have one post. The latest.

I love blogs and blogging. It’s great fun to have your own little slice of the internet that’s wholly yours. But sometimes when you use it for things like group therapy or venting or anything that shows you in a transitional period it can be used against you down the road and that can be quite dangerous. Especially if you’re honest and human in your voice because we’re all far from perfect.

I have archived all my personal posts from the past few months for my own personal vault and will continue to write about myself and the struggles I’m going through but from now on they will all have an expiration date. When I no longer think they’re relevant to who I am or what my situation is I’ll archive them and take them down. We all grow as people every day in our knowledge and experiences of the world and while I think it can be an interesting journey down memory lane it’s a journey best experienced alone. This is my perspective at least and since it’s my corner of the internet that’s my reality and my choice.