What I wrote about

Like I assume some of you have, I went through old OurSalon posts to save a bunch of them. As I did, I filed them in categories. I used:

Personal, Music, Life
Tales of J
One sentence posts
Race, Racism, other bigotry
Politics & Democracy
Economics and business
Israel & Jewish
Satire & Humor

Some posts fit into more than one category, so I just picked one.

I didn’t save everything and, with very few exceptions, I didn’t save threads. Even if I were tempted to, saving multiple pages of comments was too much of a pain, and I was mostly interested in the content in case I wanted to repost. I saved the comment thread from Reply To A Friend Checking On Me, the post immediately following Jonah’s death, which was already saved from OS where comments weren’t in pages. However, a problem with old threads is that if anyone commenting deleted their account, their comments vanished, though the replies to them didn’t, which in threads gets confusing.

No point in saving a post about pictures of rainbows. I have the shots, I don’t need the text. There were a lot of that kind of post. Sometimes I saved reporting posts with pictures, not because I expect to repost them but because they’re part of a body of work which has aspects of a diary and family might be interested in some of that stuff some year.

I didn’t save posts like the one where I organized a mass move from Open Salon to Our Salon. Now it’s irrelevant.

I didn’t save posts where I yelled at other bloggers for whatever. Also irrelevant. (I did save posts about what sorts of things to avoid when blogging because that might come in handy some day.)  I didn’t drag that baggage.

I tend to think of myself as an economic writer but, really, I wrote about a lot of things more than I wrote about that, or at least saved about that, because some economic posts were redundant based on earlier posts – and I don’t mean just reposts. I of course repeated myself.

The biggest category by far was Personal, Music, Life, and that’s without the Tales of J posts. While I was saving, I found more posts about my daughter than I expected, though that’s mainly from expectations of a low number.

The next biggest, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised by this, is Race, Racism, and other bigotry. My Islamophobia count was a bit higher than I remembered.

I think the Politics & Democracy category and the Israel & Jewish categories were roughly the same size, the latter having more Jewish content than Israel content. In this case there’s a lot I didn’t save because they were topical at the time and there will never be a reason to repost them. There’s no point in saving current events rants against Netanyahu. I don’t ever expect to post again about his addressing Congress without telling the President he was coming. Like I didn’t save most of my Trump rants in Politics & Democracy. We know too much of that content by heart.

I guess because of what I omitted, these counts tell me less about what I wrote about than about what I wrote about that I thought was worth saving. Once in a while I saved something even in non-personal categories that I never expect to repost, like a Ground Zero Mosque post, which received more readers by far than anything else I ever wrote (and I know from a teacher who blogged with us was used in the classroom). That post also generated a comment on Open that shocked the living crap out of me, from Markinjapan saying “I really, really misjudged you.” Once I moved to OurSalon, that most viewed designation belonged to a post entitled That Girl in McKinney.

When you look at old posts, particularly if you look at threads (I did sometimes), you also find out which posts impressed readers the most.  One of those possibilities I didn’t look at the thread of and I don’t remember its title; it was about using a lake as an analogy for wealth distribution, which for some reason more people seemed to like than another post using time as an analogy for wealth distribution, which I preferred. The one I’m sure of, though, was a post called How the Angry White Guys Got That Way because I synthesized aspects of a few decades of American history in ways I don’t think had ever been done.

What did you find when/if you saved your old posts? Did anything surprise you?

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