Digital Scrapbook

My current goal is to make my own life easier and take some pressure off this mental backlog of stuff I wanted to share but never do, because I am trying to do it all at once.

I’ve also been working on trying to finish this scrapbook I’ve been making of our (amazing) holiday to Orlando, Florida in September last year. I started it about 9 months ago. Scrapbooks are harder work than they look. [1]

Anyway, as slow going as I am finding scrapbooking it is actually really enjoyable to flick back through and feel the warm and fuzzy memories return. The older I get the more I value holding onto memories of the good times.

I would like my blog/website to be – a kind of digital scrapbook [2] if you will. Just a collection of my thoughts, whims, obsessions, creative endeavours, and the random shit I learned. None of it needs to be perfect (just as my holiday scrapbook has so many spelling mistakes in it but its still a joy to look through).

I’ve been thinking about why I want to share this out here on the internet, instead of just keeping it in my own vault of notes.

• I like making things and learning new skills. I enjoy the creativity of messing around with websites, and being able to page through it to view what I’ve built.
• I want to make sense of the swirl of thoughts and feelings, and somehow sharing them online feels like the way I should do that – because maybe someone else has these same experiences and can help me figure it out?
• I want to make some connections with other people. I want to find a community I feel like I can be part of, to find my (online) milieu.
• I am not good at “putting myself out there” socially, and perhaps doing this at first from the relative anonymity of online will help me gain confidence to do the same in the real world.

I guess what I’ve landed on here is akin to the IndieWeb concept of creating a “digital garden” but I now know better than to waste energy going down any more internet rabbits holes on these internet trend buzz terms! No more getting muddled up on other people’s ideas of what to do, and just doing my own thing! [3][4]

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Footnotes

[1] It’s the photo corners, man. They’re so fiddly to peel the backing off both sides, like 4 times per photo. There has to be a better way.

[2] I am fighting the urge to call this a “scropbook” after a weirdly consistent typo I saw once in a client’s database which just really tickled me. I can’t explain why… but the word “scropbook” is hilarious to me. Also I do know that a “digital scrapbooking” is a thing in the actual scrapbooking world, but whatever this is my blog and I do what I want. 😜

[3] I saw a Mastodon toot from Elizabeth Tai this morning link to her own blog about Digital Gardening which made me realise I’d been thinking about something really similar!

[4] Plus, I have enough going on with my IRL garden which is an overgrown mess, so right now gardening to me is a lot of hard work that involves manual labour to rip out some hardcore weeds before I can get to growing anything new! I don’t want to have to think about “gardening” my digital life too!