Treading the past

19 August 2003

This evening I logged onto an old web account and cruised through the files there. I found old photos, old writings, perl scripts, flash movies. Generally stuff that I’d forgotten about. I tend to be a hoarder. I find it difficult to get rid of things because I enjoy the memories that they bring. I also have an irrational paranoia about needing something just after I’ve thrown it out.

About a year ago I lost a whole bunch of data from my past. My then flat-mate was storing the data on one of his servers, which unfortunately suffered a crash. The data was lost. Having it on this server was my idea of a backup. Maybe not a backup, but an archive. Anyway, it was gone. I was philosophical about it at the time. There was really nothing there that I had needed to reference in quite some time, so it wasn’t really a practical loss, merely a sentimental one.

This evening (more than a year on) I remembered something else that was on that disc that I would have liked to have kept. Not because I needed it for anything, but simply because it’s pleasurable to have. I guess this is how people feel after their house is damaged by fire or flood and they lose all the photographs they’ve taken over the years. It’s not that the photos are important for anything, but that they mean a lot to us. They serve as triggers for the memory. Memories are important.

What I lost was not photographs, but about 250 poems that I’d written as a teenager. You know the sort, really crappy angst-ridden teen poems. It’s not that they were good – they certainly were not. But they were my creative output in an important time of my life. I’d really really like them back. But they’re gone. Forever.

About Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan has been hacking on the web since around 1996 following an unfortunate incident with a margarine tub. Since then he’s spread himself between both front- and back-end development projects, and now is Director and Senior Web Developer at edgeofmyseat.com in Maidenhead, UK (GEO: 51.5217, -0.7177). Prior to this, Drew was a Web Developer for Yahoo!, and before that primarily worked as a technical lead within design and branding agencies for clients such as Nissan, Goodyear Dunlop, Siemens/Bosch, Cadburys, ICI Dulux and Virgin.net. Somewhere along the way, Drew managed to get himself embroiled with Dreamweaver and was made an early Macromedia Evangelist for that product. This lead to book deals, public appearances, fame, glory, and his eventual downfall.

Picking himself up again, Drew is now a strong advocate for best practises, and stood as Group Lead for The Web Standards Project 2006-08. He has had articles published by A List Apart, Adobe, and O’Reilly Media’s XML.com, mostly due to mistaken identity. Drew is a proponent of the lower-case semantic web, and is currently expending energies in the direction of the microformats movement, with particular interests in making parsers an off-the-shelf commodity and developing simple UI conventions. He writes here at all in the head and, with a little help from his friends, at 24 ways.

Comments

§ Owen: It’s tempting, in a mildly destructive way, to think that with the data gone, that part of your creativity or personality has gone too. But that’s not true. Your angst-ridden, poetry-writing teenage self can never be lost; it’s a little obscure, perhaps, hidden beneath the mature fa�ade you now present to the world, but lurking still, like only angst-ridden, poetry-writing teenagers can. Treasure him, even though he’ll hate you for it.
§ Jesse: I keep a shoe box of assorted ’crap’ from years gone by. It is nice to go through it every so often.. lots of memories.

Nothing on my computer though.. don’t trust them ;)
§ owen: I have a whole set of old cds that my OS can’t read. every now and then and re-install WindowsME and play them.
§ Brian: The one thing that troubles me with this ”web stuff” is that we are losing some of the typographical gems that we had. Not always through accidental loss either - it’s all too easy to delete a website and replace it with this year’s ”style”.
Remember all those old railway posters? or maybe the designs and posters of the 80’s; well most of those were fairly permanent and they record the style of the time.
Our websites display today’s style but are so easily disposed of and replaced.
Will there be a recorded style for the 2000s?
§ zlog: One word;

http://www.archive.org

(maybe that should be http://www.geocities.com/, I get them mixed up)

All in the <head>