| Why do I want to print it? Well, first off, I am a pack-rat, I'm an archivist. I cling. I also worry about the permanence of this online nebulous thing. Right now, it is all up to Google. If Google decides to get rid of the Living Rockumentary, it is gone. Google own Blogger. Blogger owns me.
There is some code in blogger that you can apply to your blog template that allows you to put your entire blog on one page in one file. You can then save that to your hard drive and do whatever you want with it. There are two problems. One is that you have to be very careful doing it or you could mess up your current blog. The other is that it is going to be 4276 posts long. Some posts are small, some are large, some have pictures, comments etc. I think if you formatted it for printing it would be somewhere between 2000 and 3000 pages long.
That's kind of a lot. How many trees go into six reams of paper? But where will this all lead to in say, fifty years? Will all this old two dimensional online fodder be kept up to date and vibrant or will its ancient formats be unviewable. Is the current html and css and java and all that just the future 8mm, vhs, and piano roll? OR will the evolution be smooth enough that the data is updated to remain? I don't know. It's up in the air.
But if I printed it out. It would be on paper and I know that it could last for many, many years.
But, then again, so what? Why bother? Who cares if this nonsense stands the test of time? Will my life be any less than it could be if it was all deleted tomorrow? Nobody can say for sure. I imagine that when I am 120 years old, I might get a kick out of some of the stuff we've written here.
Or maybe the Living Rockumentary itself will live that long. Is there an end for it? Or will I keep typing away, sending messages to nowhere for the rest of my life? It's been five years so far. What's five got that fifty doesn't?
3 comments:
Funny. A friend of mine has had two novels published. The second one came out in paperback recently so he was in town last night for a reading. We were talking with the shopkeeper about writing, how all writing is hard (he was humbly trying to minimize his achievement). So we agreed that poems are hard; songs, too. But later, I decided that good songs, etc, are hard to write, but bad songs are relatively easy. BUT I would think that even bad novels are hard to write just because of the volume of words involved!
So, that's why I think it would be swell to have a print out of 5 years of online writing--yes, the trees will have to fall, but thanks to the paper, someone will hear them (okay, this metaphor was trying to be too clever and so I think it's just confusing).
I don't know, deleting everything might also give you the same sense of accomplishment!
I delete my blogs all the time. Some are nice and should have permanence, some are just blah whatever and don't maybe deserve it, and others (in my case) are way too deep a window to the soul and when it's not a good place then it's like a diary entry, just too lonesome to keep up for more than a short bit.
Save it to a file as text or html - there will always be tools to view and convert these formats - then keep copies of the file on a couple of disks - a file is better than paper because you can search it, it takes up less physical space and resources, and it's easy to duplicate.
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