Unlocked my 1997 online journal

Posted by on January 12th, 2018  •  0 Comments

Back in 2002 my dean asked me to lock my online journal. I’d been writing it since 1997. She thought it made me look unprofessional and she was probably right, though it wasn’t anything bizarre or salacious. It was/is just a bunch of daily writing about working as a printer and raising two teenagers. Last century an online journal was a new thing. WordPress hadn’t been invented, so you had to know how to build a website from scratch. Required skills were html, css, ftp and Photoshop…or at least some kind of image editor.

I used that online journal to learn all that stuff as soon as I bought my first computer in ’97. Anyway, since I’m between jobs right now and not working at the college, I’ve decided to unlock it. Here is the link into the old journal website. The navigation is in Flash…but if you don’t have Flash, you can use the links at the bottom of each post to navigate. It’s not responsive. They hadn’t invented smartphones in ’97, so that was not a concern.

I also have paper journals going back to when I first started drawing in 1971. My sketch pads double as my journals. I find that writing clears the mind. Putting my thoughts down on paper makes them easier to understand. Sort of like emptying out my backpack to see why its so heavy.  Once I can see everything in the clear light of day I can move forward.

I’ve been having a lot of fun studying Javascript at www.lynda.com. They have a guy working there called Morton Rand Hendrickson. He teaches a lot of stuff for Lynda. I’ve taken several WordPress classes from him and he’s always great. In the Javascript class he’s taught me how to build an online clock. I used to teach a clock in Flash Actionscript, so it was interesting to see how similar the Javascript programing was to the old Actionscript. He’s also taught me how to build a typing application that measures the speed and accuracy of your typing. I’ve not put that one online yet, but it was some very interesting programming.

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