tagged in a blog meme like it’s the 90’s

My old school pal Matt tagged me in this meme which I see as a nice little engagement strategy by folks to get people interested in bringing back the old web. I had read another blogging challenge post before I saw this one (and bless Matt for tagging me on Mastodon so I’d actually see it, I haven’t really given my RSS reader a tune up in a while though I do read blog posts that I see on Mastodon or Bluesky) so I’ve been thinking about it. I don’t update this blog a lot but I do always do my year end wrap-ups and try to post when there’s a major thing going on. Been doing it since 1997, same web address. More from me below, these questions are slight adjustments from the ones he answered.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

After college in 1990 I moved to Seattle, which was far from my family. My mom, who I’d previously thought of as somewhat anxious but I think might today be considered an N-Mom, was always wanting to know what I was up to. She’d call and leave increasingly agitated messages if I didn’t get back to her quickly. By the time I returned her call she’d be sure something terrible had happened to me when I was really just mostly out living the life of a 20-something in a cool city at a cool time. As I said in my first post “This way my mother can be rest assured that I haven’t drowned and Jack and I will have something to do with all the Quick Cam photos we take”

a very smol black and white image of me holding my hand up in front of my face.

There were a lot of people who had their own websites and I read a few blogs at the time. I had an interesting job as a live-in caretaker at an Odd Fellows Hall (no not that one) and there was a lot going on. I updated one big raw HTML file (I don’t even think I put in the HTML anchors for the individual days until later) and uploaded it to my ISP’s website along with very very small JPGs and GIFs.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

I had a website before I had a blog. It was a bunch of raw HTML files that kept track of certain things such as links of the week, when I saw Dave Eggers read from his book, and a Donald Barthelme fan page. All with teeny tiny images from my Quick Cam or my Sony Mavica (the digital camera which saved the images to floppy disk). It was how I learned HTML and CSS, by practicing.

At some point I moved over to a CMS, which was a locally hosted instance of WordPress and I never stopped (even though recent events have showed me that maybe I should work on finding another solution). I started a second blog in 1999, librarian.net which was for more professional stuff. It’s still going too, same domain. I did it by hand, and then I did it using Movable Type, and then I switched to WordPress. When I was an “official blogger” at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, I made a little mini-site in MT to track what I did there.

screenshot of my blog posts from when I went to the DNC. They can be read at the link provided

The WordPress installs between my two major blogs are just a bit different, which drives me crazy but not enough to fix it.

Jessamyn.com is hosted with friends, themselves early bloggers. Librarian.net is hosted with ibiblio who have been wonderful this whole time. Both sites are a combination of blog and static pages and I manage them through the CMS or just via SFTP. I never did learn to code any more than CSS and HTML. I’m writing this right now by typing HTML into a WordPress Classic box. I enjoy the slowness of it, the deliberateness. Plus it’s mainly all I know. I also have a booklist, so just a blog of books I’ve read, which is over at jessamyn.info/booklist

What are you generally interested in writing about?

That’s really changed over time. For my personal site it used to be sort of “What I did all day” and then it became more of “What have I been thinking about” and documenting my traveling and bi-coastal lifestyle, anecdotes I thought people would enjoy, things I wanted to keep track of (like the Virgo Month of Leisure and my year-end lists). As I started using photo sharing websites and social media, I stopped writing here as much. So I’ve got images on Flickr, and I used to have tweets on Twitter/X but now I just have them archived and I only have an account there so I can authorize some old other websites.

My blogs as I use them today feel a lot more like historical records and a lot less like conversations with friends. Those have moved more towards social platforms which themselves shift over time. And I live in Vermont which means that many of my friends who I interact with in real life aren’t heavily on social media and we mainly communicate through Signal chat groups. I have a few other social groups who I interact with over Slack. So I have a sense, still, of being constantly connected with groups of nerds, it’s just not happening through the slow path of blogs as much as it used to be.

The things I record, then, are things which I notice in the world or things that I think make a good story. When I fought Equifax and won, that was a good story. I put it on Medium as was the style at the time, but I also posted on my blog. When I got cranky about Vermont museums not being accessible to people because of user fees, I sent some constructive emails but I also posted about it on my blog. I wrote about my drug overdose but I didn’t link to it very much. I like to write little explainers for the things I do that I think other people might like to do, so how to add fair use images to people’s Wikipedia pages or how to search for names for historical research.

One of my early librarian mentors, Sandy Berman, had a phrase that has always resonated with me: I can’t have information I know would be of interest to someone and not share it.” That’s pretty much how I think about what to write about for my professional blog.

a home made postage stamp showing Sandy Berman, an older white man with a beard wearing a black top and maybe a lanyard. It has his name, his DDC classification number (I think?) and the quotation I mentioned

I made this!

My personal blog is more about tracking milestones. My mom, my original reason for blogging, died in 2017 and my dad has been gone since 2011. I don’t really have family who read my personal blog (my sister might check in from time to time, my boyfriend reads what I write when I send him a link, this is just fine with me) so I’m mostly writing for me. I usually x-post what I write on this blog on facebook where sometimes people chat about it there or leave me comments here. If people comment here, I’ll usually reply via email. It’s a little ridiculous, but it works for me.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

If nothing else, this question has encouraged me to get a better search function on this site. A recent-ish post that I liked was just this one, of gratitude “Thanks to…” After my mother died and my sister and I really started applying ourselves to cleaning out her house, it became clear that it was a HUGE project. Many many people helped us, either for pay or for free and I was grateful for all of them. Please enjoy these photos, which tell more about this particular journey than any blog post ever could.

I think there have always been essential tensions with blogging, from back in the day, are you linking to things on the web, or are you telling your own story? Short form or long form? Dishing about other people or only writing things that you could publish in a newspaper? I think this blog tends more towards my stories (librarian.net is more linky though not entirely), it’s definitely longer form than it used to be, and I’ve never been very dishy but I’m even more mindful now of respecting other people’s right to tell their own stories.

me, a white lady with her hair in a brain, making a shrugging gesture in front of a wall on which is written "What's a place like this doing to a nice girl like you?"

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I redesign every few years whether it needs it or not but ultimately I’m a blogger not a coder so I mostly want it to work decently and not look the worst and that’s about it.

What’s the question you wanted to answer but which wasn’t asked?

One of the things that I think is nice about shifting social media is how many of these people it’s possible to stay in touch with… still. So there are people I knew back in the early blogging days who have kids who are almost as old as we were then. I have a hard time getting my head around what it must be like to have grown up in a world where blogs are just taken for granted, like it’s just how a lot of internet content is, mainstream. I love being able to “age in place” on the web, still, even as I don’t keep up my blog like I used to, and haven’t really taken to stuff like TikTok or even Snapchat if I’m honest.

I look at photos from SXSW which are themselves 15 years old and think “I’d had a blog for a decade by then” and “Gosh we were so YOUNG.” I think about all the online spaces that still exist, and which were created in many cases BY US, where those people still are, where I know them and they know me. I’m very thankful to have been, to still be, a part of it, even a small one. And I miss Brad who has been gone a very long time and who was really one of our best.

Tag ‘em.

I’m going to tag a few people who I still follow on Mastodon: Dinah/metagrrrl, Terence Eden, Garrett/dangerousmeta! and, of course, Peter and PB.

wraps up VI

a sunny window with many plants on a tables soaking up the sun

The wrap-ups of the wrap-ups are now their own thing! You can view past wrap-ups here: 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.

I’ve now completely moved over to Mastodon and I like it there. I am also on Bluesky which is fun in its own way. I still have accounts on all the Big Platforms, but I’m there a lot less often. I do put pictures on Flickr if you want to follow along. Biggest deal of the past year was that I’m no longer the legal owner of MetaFilter; it’s been transitioned into a community-owned model and while the site is still going to have some challenges, I was (mostly) happy to have been able to help it stay afloat. MLTSHP is still run by the community, with paperwork and legal stuff mainly done by me, and it’s delightful.

My regular job has been going mostly well. I’ve gotten to oversee adding more people to Flickr Commons which is pretty exciting. There’s a fun content browser here if you’d like to see what kind of stuff is there. My house remains standing despite all my concerns that it’s falling apart. Jim and I saw the total solar eclipse from a few miles up the road and it was transcendent. Thanks for reading.

my year in cities and towns, 2024

photograph of a bed in a small guesrtoom. There is a small cat on the bed and a large chicken head from a mascot costume

I’ve been doing this guestroom tracking for twenty years! Last year I went one place, twice, for one night each. I am enjoying staying put, still. No hotels at all. The longer I stay away from hotels and airplanes, the more they seem mysterious and unpleasant to me. There’s a rhythm to local life here, one that I wasn’t as in tune with when I was traveling as much. I’d still like to get out and about a bit more, go down to Westport, see my sister more than twice, do fun things with Jim in distant locations, see my non-local friends more than rarely.

Past years: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008 2007, 2006, 2005.

Farewell Marian Labonte

This is a short eulogy that I gave at the memorial service for my longtime friend, Marian. The picture above is the two of us from drop-in time, taken on her iPad, a photo her son sent me when he was cleaning up her tech. There is also a short obit in the local newspaper.

Marian was, as we say in my family, a hot ticket.

I met her when I was living in Bethel with Ola O’Dell, who some of you might know, another woman who Got Things Done.

She was always up to something, had a plan or a scheme, and had something she wanted YOU to be up to also. She would point at you with her, scaly hands with nicely painted nails, and tell you what your part in all of her schemes was going to be.

I mostly became friends with Marian through her visits to the library. Not only was she a voracious reader (and we liked some of the same books, so she was there with the suggestions, though she was a little less torture-avoidant than I was so I always had to watch it) and sometimes Scrabble player, she always came in to get help with one of her many tech devices. I knew her from her first flip phone, through her first smart phone. I was there when she got a Kindle, an iPad, a second smart phone to replace the first, a second Kindle, and her Apple watch which she would show off to me because she loved that it had a Snoopy watch face; her love of dogs was pure and extremely inclusive. I first met Todd over text (and Zoom) because we were on Marian’s Tech Support Team, trying to support her schemes while quietly not letting her get too into the weeds.

But she wasn’t all tech gadgets, Marian also loved Vermont and driving around it in her little Miata. She was always planning a ride over this mountain or that gap or that other back road and while I think I only got roped into one of them—feeling all the while like I was on Mister Toad’s Wild Ride in Wind in the Willows—she was always going somewhere and doing something and would send me emails and later texts about her trips.

Most importantly, she was all about helping other people. She was a huge accessibility advocate (maybe you didn’t know this but her hearing wasn’t great – I was always slightly hollering when we spoke at the library) and she successfully hassled the library into getting captions for their Zoom book group. She hassled the movie theater into getting live captions for their movies, and one of the things we would do at drop-in time at the library was track down phone numbers for local news stations (and Netflix, do you know how hard it is to find a phone number for Netflix?) so that she could hassle them about the news not having proper captions. She always wanted me to tell people about caption phones, cheaper hearing aids from Costco, and live captions at the movies. She helped so many people in this community get access to the things they deserve. She was always swinging by Veggie Van Go and would leave me a random bag of carrots or apples or a box of water (?) saying “Us single women need to stick together”

She was part of my day to day life and I will miss her at the library and miss her emails and texts. She texted like a teenager. I’ll read you one of the last texts she sent me which I think gives you a great sense of Marian (I’d just sent her a Halloween card a few weeks previous)

Hi J: What a lovely card. And the stamps! I’ve been trying to clean up my house. It’s getting there.[handclap emoji] Did you ever get your kid’s kindle? Do you love it? My replacement kindle is in a coma. Hoping you can bring it up to where it should be. Sorry I missed you again today. I’ve been sleeping a lot, also. Hope you & Jim are fine. [double heart emoji][dog emoji][handclap emoji][thumbs up emoji][warm smile emoji]

Marian was my friend and a force of nature. I will miss her.

How your email finds me…

A small tortiseshell cat sits in a backyard full of tall grass and thinks it is harder to see than it really is

My Virgo Month of Leisure was a blur. Like many people, I’ve been alternating between torpor and panic as the days get shorter and colder. Here are a few things you might like to know if you’re someone who reads this space.

I turned on my heat, meaning the boiler, for the first time this season today. I actually enjoy the Vermont ritual of making small talk by talking about how you heat your house. My heat pumps have been a delight. Having them means I can keep my office and bedroom warm without heating a whole half-house at the same time (I have two zones!). But they can’t really make a chilly bathtub warm up very quickly and today was the day I woke up wanting to take a shower and not be chilly so on it went.

I applied for an ISSN for my other blog today. I just made a post there the other day and thought I should make one here too.

Virgo month of civic leisure

me standing in an empty town hall basement waving a small american flag. I have bright orange sneakers on

Last year around this time I got COVID which I did not appreciate. This year is a bit more under control and as the Virgo Month of Leisure comes around I am looking forward to a few weeks of board meetings. I’ve talked about this a little bit before but not much. In short, being an elected Justice of the Peace, a position I’ve held since 2013, contains a number of smaller positions. You can be a notary if you want (I am a notary), you can perform weddings if you want (I’ve done 31) and you serve on both the Board of Civil Authority (elections, you can see my photos from the primary here) and the Board of Abatement (tax/water bill appeals). There are a few meetings, it’s mostly good.

Over time people cycle on and off of this group and I’ve found myself one of the more senior members of it so I am the chair. I have mixed feelings about this. I am a little too spacey to run meetings well, but I have a good deal with my vice-chair that she will run the meetings and I will run the Zoom part of them. Randolph recently completed a town-wide reappraisal and nearly everyone’s property values shot up. This caused a certain degree of alarm. Because of the way taxes work (the town’s total budget divided by the total value of all the properties winds up being how much tax you pay) an increase in everyone’s property values doesn’t necessarily mean you pay a lot more taxes but you might pay some. It hasn’t been a great few years in terms of everyone’s income vs. their expenses, so many people are appealing the appraisal of their properties. We as a board hear these appeals. There are a lot of laws that tightly govern how we do these and it’s a lot to keep track of. We have six appeals, these each require a hearing, a property inspection, a second hearing and our little board of volunteers has to try to determine a new fair value of the property, or determine that the value the appraisers determined was already fair. One of the people appealing is our community hospital with their multi-million dollar appraisal. They brought a lawyer who was… feisty.

All of this is to say, I’ve got a lot of admin and paperwork to be doing in the next several weeks and at least a few contentious hearings and all of it is on a fairly tight timeline. I want to do a good job. I want to sneak in some leisure. I want to get outside and welcome the incoming Autumn season which is by far my favorite. And I’m mostly writing this down here as an accountability step. I know the Virgo Month of Leisure starts today. I know that, like always, I have a bit too many things scheduled in a bit too little time. And I know that I can get a bit too, as my friend Jenna calls it “Atlas-like” thinking it’s all on my shoulders. It’s not. We all help. It’s a nice crowd. I think we’ll do okay.

looking back at bad decisions

wooden stairs go down from a green forrested area and end at a shallow river

One of my part-time jobs is having a big company retreat at a fancy resort in Vermont. This is a good opportunity for me to meet my colleagues in real life. Since COVID I’ve curtailed my travel to nearly zero (first for COVID reasons and now mostly for save-the-planet and “I’m a homeowner now and I like being here” reasons) and it is nice to get a chance for a change of scenery. The place where this event is held is like a Vermont Disneyland, almost unrecognizable to me as Vermont even though the actual town is the same size as the one I live in. I work for a small group (maybe five of us) within a larger group of about 300 people.

I showed up to the event and did not know anyone since my colleagues hadn’t arrived yet. I decided to go for a short hike. The hike, which I’d researched online, said it was “moderate” which me, a non-hiker, didn’t quite understand but I figured it was one step up from “easy” so I would be fine. And, ultimately, I was fine. But the hike was strenuous for me, someone who walks a mile or two most days, but rarely uphill. And it was sort of warm out. The good news was I was well dressed for it and decently prepared. I had the foresight to pack water, snacks, bug spray, sunglasses, a good hat and a well-charged cell phone. But what I hadn’t done was tell anyone where I was going (“on a hike!”) and as the trail got steeper and I got more sweaty and tired out and looked at the rest of the uphill trail as I was in a strangely-empty forest I got a sudden ping of nerves.

I learned a weird family story when my great uncle Johnny died in 2005. He was from the branch of my dad’s family who had stayed in Vermont when everyone else moved to California or New York. I did not know him well because my dad was not a real “hang with the family” sort of guy. There was a photo of Johnny at his memorial service with his brother, my grandfather, and his own father. The caption, written by his daughter, read “Daddy, Uncle Joe and Grandpa West. Picture shot day Grandpa died on the Long Trail.” This seems like one of those stories which, if it were in your family, someone would have told you. But my family on that side were not great storytellers, so I didn’t know this one. Apparently he’d dropped dead of a heart attack, Johnny had stayed with the body while my grandad went to get help. It was 1932 and he was forty-five years old. That whole story sprang into my head unbidden as I scrambled up the side of a short mountain and walked across a stream I later learned was called West Branch Little River. I was on the Long Trail and I was really tired out. I wondered if I should text someone what specific subtrail I was on–at least I had great cell service–but then it felt like one of those ominous portent things and I ultimately didn’t. It wasn’t smart. I realized there is sometimes a gap between knowing the right thing to do and actually doing it.

a bad photo of a sideways photo in a photo album with the caption that it saysin the post. You can barely make out two men standing next to a sign saying Long Trail.

It wound up okay, the trail started going down not up. I came back to the friendly little Barnes Camp visitors center. I sat in the shade and drank a lot of water. I showed back up to the event and saw a few faces I recognized. I introduced myself to the President of Flickr and chatted with the CFOs daughter. The endorphins of the hike gave me a little more capacity for chitchat and I enjoyed myself. Headed home before I hit a wall of tired and overpeopling. Once I got back home I told a few people about the little hike, about how it was lovely but also oddly scary in a way I didn’t expect, and how I’d tell them if I was heading out into the woods alone next time, as much a promise to myself as to them.