In which I explain why suddenly all the bits of blogging I’ve done over the years have now found a home here, even if that means Google will probably shun for all eternity for duplicating content or some such.

There's a wonderful Mitchell and Webb sketch from their radio series in which a guy goes to heaven and is informed by the angels there that in terms of hours spent, added up, his lifes work consisted mainly of playing Minesweeper on his computer.

"It’s where you really put the hours in."

I was reading a blog post by someone saying that all things considered when he adds it up, probably by the end of his life it'll be his blog which will he'll consider his magnum opus. For similar reasons really; it’s where he really put the hours in.

Of course the joke above is about the way we waste our lives on meaningless trivialities even when we know that more important things await. The reason this guy piqued my interest was because I'd hadn't ever really considered blogging as something more significant. I'd always put it down somewhere a lot closer to Minesweeper on my personal spectrum of triviality.

Of course unlike playing Minesweeper the triviality of blogging depends entirely on the how you do it. But also, unlike your Minesweeper games (unless you're some kind of screen capture nut) you blog is more likely to be left for all eternity to be viewed. Which got me thinking about the fact that my own blogging activity which, whilst being terribly sporadic was also widely spread across the internet in all sorts of places.

I had a very personal blog way back when which was mainly about little things which happened to me. This is nowdays covered more or less by twitter, but back then I felt obliged to write more than 140 characters to fill up a bit of space. Ooh I saw a funny thing on the way to work. Wow! that sandwich was great, only longer, and more so.

That blog ended almost exactly when I had my first child and then I didn't really do anything again for a while. When I got the urge to start up again though it didn't feel right to reanimate the corpse of the old blog so I started a new one, and another, and then one about Flash (because I started working with Flash), and then one where I was going to post photos of paintings I'd done under a psuedonym (I know, WTF?) and then an aborted one about Android development (never really happened) and then one day having something proper to write for a change I started a wordpress.com blog and wrote a few posts there too.

Then I went freelance and as part of my portfolio site I included the obligatory blog. Again with dreams of weekly updates and vast hordes of traffic decending upon my every utterance. That of course never happened, partly I'm happy to say because I was busy with work.

None of this added up to much and I found myself with lots of little silos where I imagined rivers of content would flow and where it turned out, only drips of rare content ever trickled. However, reading the aformentioned blog post made me realised that whilst I none of these bits of blogging ever really amounted to much on their own, I had in fact been blogging, here and there for the entire time.

So with a bit of help from various export and import features of the various blogging platforms I’ve used over the years, and with a bit of hand crafted XML (the oldest blog was all my own work) I’ve managed to gather the entire lot in one place and now this is the home to that.

I probably should have done it all along. Hindsight. Anyway it feels good to tidy things up a little, to find a place for everything and put everything in it’s place. No doubt now silence will descend again. Twas ever thus.