Twenty years of Journal entries…
August 14, 2023, 1:48 PM
I’m a little bit late with this (because I remembered the wrong date – sue me), but I feel like I still need to mark the occasion: July 23 marked twenty years of the Journal on Schumin Web. Yeah, I’ve been doing this specific incarnation of blogging for over two decades now. Though truth be told, blogging has been a part of Schumin Web since day one. It originally started out as a weekly feature, aptly called “News of the Week”, and it had this very nineties-looking logo to go with it:
I’m pretty sure that took me about five minutes to make, and I probably made it in MS Paint or something. I also don’t remember what font that is, and I’m fine with that, because some things should probably remain in the past. Unfortunately, most of the News of the Week content has been lost to time, as it was retired before I began actively archiving content, and the Internet Archive can only do so much.
I did, however, manage to rescue two pieces from the dustbin of history. This is what I said on April 16, 1997:
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, can call the town of Stuarts Draft dull and get away with it. Why? Read on…
Today at Stuarts Draft High School, there was an explosion. Not from any kind of terrorist bomb, but from Mr. Patterson’s room, the chemistry lab. In an experiment that had been done many times before without any problems. But today, the beaker exploded, injuring several students, and making a noise that could be heard as far as the softball field, OUTSIDE. At the time of the explosion, I was in Mrs. Hevener’s room, working on a freewrite. Someone asked out loud, “What was that?” and several others quickly replied, “Mr. Patterson,” because he is known to blow things up (usually controlled and on purpose). But this time it was an accident.
A short time after the explosion, the ambulances and the fire trucks pulled in. This worried many of us. Then Mr. Schindler, our principal, got on the intercom and explained the situation. There was an explosion, some students were injured, that we were to stay in our classrooms, and there was no danger to us.
It was amazing to see all this. They set up huge fans in the science wing to vent out the gases, and blocked off the hallway with “fire department tape”, like police tape. In our room, it was a comfortable spot to watch all the commotion. We had the windows open, and the door open, allowing for a nice breeze in the room (they hadn’t changed over to A/C yet). Then one of the firemen came and told us to close our windows and the door, so that they could vent Mr. Patterson’s room as safely and effectively as possible. With that, the room ceased to be a classroom. It was a sauna.
Because we had a large window in the room, the sun was heating up the room. And having to keep the windows and door closed, we had to live with it. Then someone lit a match in the room. Everyone (including myself) quickly chewed him out, because we had to keep the room closed up, and now we had a noxious odor with us. The smell eventually went away. And then more waiting.
Then 9:52 rolled around, the normal end of 1st block. No bell. They were holding the bell until they were done enough for us to change classes. More waiting.
We waited another 45 minutes until Mr. Schindler made the announcement that we would be changing classes shortly. Finally, we could open up the room again.
After being released from 1st block, we had 45 minutes of 2nd block, and the regular schedule picked up from there.
So, as I said before, no one can call Stuarts Draft dull and get away with it.
I still remember this incident, and how every time Schindler got on the PA to give us information, he would introduce himself, saying, “This is Mr. Schindler,” before saying whatever he needed to say. I couldn’t help but think, dude, we know who you are. After all, he never introduced himself any other time on the PA system, such as for morning announcements or anything else. In any case, it was a very interesting day.
Just to provide a little bit of context here, I was fifteen years old and in tenth grade, and the website was in its second year of operation. So at that point, the website was established but still finding its voice, and had already earned a few haters, in the form of certain teachers in the school who tried to bully me into changing what I wrote by giving me misinformation about what I could and could not write about (i.e. teaching all of the wrong lessons). When I dug this post out of the Internet Archive, it made me cringe quite a bit, not just because of the writing, which was definitely the work of a much younger person who was not as skilled in writing, but for the various design choices that I had made. The whole website sat in a frameset. The font that I had chosen was Comic Sans. So many bad design decisions, but in my defense, it was the nineties, and a lot of websites looked like that back then. But at its core, what I wrote was basically a blog post, though the term “blog” to describe it would not come along for a while still. So it fits. It tells a story, using words to paint a picture.
I found another one, too, this one from September 11, 1997:
Have you noticed a few words missing from the title of this page? For those of you who didn’t notice, with this redesign of the Web site, “of the Week” has been dropped from the title, because with school and work, I simply can not update this page weekly. Over the past year, I could probably count on my hands how many times I updated this page. So now it’s just “News”, with its snazzy new logo, elegantly complementing the “highway” theme of the site.
For those of you who read my last posting to this page, I still have my job at directory assistance (part time now), and I’m now a junior in high school.
At work, we have recently picked up more territory. Besides serving these areas for AT&T directory assistance:
- Virginia (540, 703, 757, and 804)
- West Virginia (304)
- Maryland (301/240 and 410/443)
- Washington, DC (202)
- Delaware (302)
- New Jersey (201, 609, 732, 908, and 973)
- GTE Mobilenet (All of Virginia)
We have also picked up the following:
- Pennsylvania (Only 215 for now – The rest are coming)
- CFW PCSN (All of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC)
Also, I am a “thumbody”, meaning that I have met certain criteria regarding AWT (Average Work Time), “Necessary” Time (Restroom emergencies), attendance (must be perfect), and disciplinaries (you can’t have any). With being “thumbody”, you also get the star for a day, which is a plastic star that you put at your station, and you get to keep that place for your entire shift (there are no assigned positions – just take an empty one).
At school, things are going well, with my having a great bunch of teachers this time around. I have Mrs. Shah for Computers (I had her for Accounting last year), I have Mrs. Banks for U.S. History, Mrs. Painter for Algebra II/Trigonometry, and Mr. Popeck for Latin II (I had Mr. Popeck for Latin I).
Also in school, things are smelling really “purty”, and looking pretty good, too, because they’re painting the school. It looks really great with them finally doing away with the “Earth Tones” that were hip in the 1970s when the school was built. I do love the smell of fresh paint.
And so that’s my life. Please let me know how you like the new, improved site.
Apparently, I had just redesigned the site with a highway theme, and took away the “of the week” part of the title, as I admitted that life was getting in the way of a regular update schedule for that. I remember that Dad used to occasionally shoot me an email telling me that my News of the Week page was getting a little long in the tooth, which prompted me to update it with something else. But the way that I admitted that I couldn’t keep up a weekly schedule makes 42-year-old me interpret it as, “Hello, my name is Ben, and I’m lame.”
Then after that, I’m talking about my first job, where I did directory assistance at CFW Information Services in Waynesboro. We had just picked up the contract for directory service in Pennsylvania, and were gradually phasing the new service in, one area code at a time. At the time of writing, we had phased in Philadelphia with 215, and then we added 412, which brought in Pittsburgh, a few weeks later. Then a few weeks after that, they added the rest, i.e. 610, 717, and 814. Then we would gain 724 later as 412 was split into two smaller numbering plan areas. Then CFW PCSN was very early digital cell phones, beginning the transition away from analog mobile networks, and we provided directory assistance for that new service. Then “thumbody” was a term for a person who had become eligible for THUMBS, which stood for “Together with Humor, Understanding, and Motivation, we can all Be a Success”. In other words, this was the company’s monthly recognition program for good performance. I thought it was wonderful at the time, but then I realized later that they were penalizing you for having restroom needs, especially when they had this tendency to occasionally move your break times around, meaning that you might be on the phone for a lot longer than your schedule originally provided. Nobody would ever prevent you from going to the bathroom, but they did track it all, and occasionally ding you for it. Like, excuse me if lunch didn’t sit well with me for some reason.
And then I downshift into school discussion, where I just assume that you know who Mrs. Shah, Mrs. Banks, Mrs. Painter, and Mr. Popeck are, i.e. these people require no introduction. Unless you went to Stuarts Draft High School or were otherwise very familiar with the school, all that you got out of it was that I had three women and one man as teachers for that semester, since I provide no other details about them.
But once again, it reads like a blog post, albeit one written by a very young person. Life was going on relatively smoothly, and this post reflected that, providing a hodgepodge of different updates rather than discussing a single topic.
The News of the Week page was gradually phased out and replaced by the quote article, which took the blog element and put it out front and center, right on the main page. Rather than being a jumping-off point with a photo as a focal point like it is now, the first thing that you saw on the main page back then was a de facto blog post. I updated it roughly once a week, and that’s how things stood all through college, with the main page’s throwing you straight into content. It didn’t take a format like a blog, being a single article on the main page, and for quite a while, archival was done entirely manually, with an update’s involving moving the old article to an archive page, and then my writing a new article on the main page. When I started regularly including a photo or some other sort of graphic with it, I introduced something of a length requirement: make sure that the text goes past the bottom of the image so that the image is fully contained within the text. That led to a few cases where the idea was weak, and I was writing just to fill space in order to cover the photo. I suppose that I was used to it at that stage in my life, with my having to write papers for classes with arbitrary page length requirements. They want five or so pages, but I said everything that I needed to say in three, so I had to figure out how to fluff it out to fill this arbitrarily determined length requirement. In other words, I got good at stretching things out, though this was for my own publication rather than a third party.
So that makes the Journal really the third and longest-lasting iteration of blogging on Schumin Web. The idea came about when I was planning out how the site would look as part of a redesign in the summer of 2003. This redesign was, on its face, nothing particularly unusual. I had been redesigning the site annually for about five years at that point, with the redesign’s typically occurring in the summer. So every year, the site had a fresh, new look. What made the 2003 redesign significant, though, was that it was more than just a visual refresh. Rather, with that redesign, I was trying to pivot the site towards the future to an extent. The site had developed and matured while I was in college, with the various site sections’ being introduced in 2000 during that year’s redesign, and things began to develop within that sort of categorization system after that. The original sections were Archives, College Life, Main Event, Major Areas, Web Cam, and Writings. Then in 2001, Online Store and Photo Essays were added, having been split out from Main Event. And when it was time to redesign for 2003, that’s where things stood, with eight sections for the site. The site was fairly college-centric at the time, spilling out beyond the designated College Life section, as many of my quote articles discussed my life as a college student, among other things, and some of the “Photo Essays” were taken on campus. But in 2003, I was going to graduate and leave campus. So the site needed to be reshaped a bit in order to not appear like something of a relic, so as not to look like the work of a former college student whose best days were clearly behind him. To that end, the sections were once again shuffled around a little bit. A brand new section called “Life and Times” was introduced to replace College Life, though the College Life section remained since I still had one semester to go (therefore it was still relevant). At the same time, “Main Event” was renamed “Odds and Ends”, “Photo Essays” was renamed to “Photography”, and “Writings” was dropped entirely.
Note that there was no section called “Journal” in that list like there is now. That is because the Journal was originally conceived as a part of Life and Times rather than a standalone feature. It made sense. It covered my life and times, and therefore it fit. The idea was to run the Journal as the main page for the Life and Times section, and then also have photo sets along with it as something like extended entries. Then Journal entries beyond the first five or so would be shuffled off to Archives, where they were maintained for posterity, though the interface in Archives wasn’t set up right away, because while Journal entries were always intended to be retained, they were considered kind of throwaway in nature.
The first Journal entry was definitely a “Hello world!” kind of entry, titled “Wheeeee…”:
Whee… I’m finished. I just uploaded the entire Web site again… that’s a good several hours out of a day. This is part of that upload, my new Online Journal in Life and Times. Check it out from time to time… I hope to have fun with it.
Web site: The Schumin Web – all redesigned for the fall!
Song: Five O’Clock World by The Vogues
Quote: “Nice ball! Real monster skin!”
That was the first Journal entry, in its entirety. The entire entry was a short paragraph, and then there were those “postscript” type lines that I used to do (and that quote is from Lord Zedd on Power Rangers, from the episode “Fourth Down and Long“, and I mangled the quote). As I recall, my inspiration for making the Journal was LiveJournal, and thus the little postscripts, which that site had at the time. Those postscripts were hardcoded into the site until 2012, which is why they appeared in every Journal entry until 2012. Here’s something I’ll bet you didn’t know: “Quote” was originally supposed to be “mood”, but I changed it because I felt like there wasn’t enough potential in “mood”, plus mood should show through in the post itself. It wasn’t until I converted the site to WordPress when I could stop doing those. The original intent was to keep doing them after that, with “Quote” replaced with “Postscript” going forward, but I’m pretty sure that I only used that a couple of times before quickly realizing that all of it was unnecessary. But the shortness of the post was intentional. The Journal entries were basically status updates like you would see on Facebook these days, but Facebook wouldn’t launch for another seven or so months, and it wouldn’t be open to non-students for several more years. The shortness was intentional, because the quote article still existed, and that was longer form. Journal entries were supposed to be short and spontaneous, and quote articles were for longer pieces. Quote articles had a schedule, while I could knock out a Journal entry on the fly in under ten minutes. Keeping that in mind, I ended up producing Journal entries at a pretty decent clip. My original plan was to show five Journal entries on the page. A little more than a month in, this was expanded to 20, because I was writing a lot, and I felt like they were rolling off of the page too quickly (for comparison, for whatever it’s worth, the current Journal main page displays 15 entries).
Meanwhile, it’s true what they say: a house divided amongst itself cannot stand. While it was my original plan to run the quote article and the Journal in tandem, with each one’s serving a different purpose, it would turn out that I didn’t have enough creative energy to operate two writing features on the site like that, with the quote article’s serving as more of a weekly editorial, while the Journal was more free-form. With the Journal’s being easier to write for, it is unsurprising that the Journal ultimately won out. If it tells you anything, in 2002, the last full calendar year before the Journal came about, there were 46 quote articles. Then in 2003, with the Journal’s beginning about halfway through the year, there were 40 quote articles. But then in 2004, as the Journal was really starting to take hold, there were only 18, and there were monthlong gaps in between some articles, especially in the back half of the year. It is unsurprising that, in March 2005, I came up with a concept for a redesigned main page that had a photograph as the main item on the page, and then implemented it in production the following day, retiring the quote article. It had served its role admirably, but it was time.
And speaking of houses divided, that’s how the Journal ended up becoming its own section. Life and Times started out as this weird hybrid of blog and photo sets, but eventually, the Journal took on a life of its own, and outgrew that format within the first year. It also seemed strange that the same material would sometimes appear in Life and Times twice: once as a Journal entry and again as a photo set. The Million Worker March photo set was like that, starting out as a Journal entry (this entry was considered quite long for the time), and then that same Journal entry was later expanded to become a full photo set. That sort of duplication of content, as well as the disjointed way that the Journal was displayed, with the first twenty entries’ being shown in Life and Times and anything older than that’s being shown in Archives, meant that things probably needed to change. When I redesigned the site again in 2004, in what would be the final major redesign for eight years, I reworked the sections once again. College Life was moved off of the main website and became its own thing, as college was over, and I didn’t want a dead subject to occupy such a prominent place. I also retired the Web Cam section, since I had lost interest, and the camera had not been active for a number of months. And the Journal was split out from Life and Times to become its own section and become a proper blog in its own right, with all entries together in one unified form. It’s funny: this seems so obvious today, but it took about 15 months to finally figure out that this was the best way to present it. Life and Times became just photo sets, with the idea of “extended Journal entries” as the basic idea behind it, but making it separate from the Journal entry has allowed it to flourish and take on its own identity as a place largely for narrative photo sets.
One thing that I’ve noticed over the years is that the Journal entries have gotten longer and longer and longer. There were a lot of Journal entries posted in fairly short succession in the Journal’s early years. But they were fairly short and they had few photos in them. Later in the 2000s, and especially in the 2010s, Journal entries got longer and more photo-intense. Believe it or not, I credit social media sites like Facebook for this. Before Facebook, a lot of the time, I was using the Journal for status updates. Once I joined Facebook in the summer of 2007, those status updates went on Facebook. And as such, with those lightweight posts’ finding a home somewhere else, the Journal entries became home for more substantial content. In other words, they got longer and longer. What was once placed in Life and Times as a full photo set is now considered a Journal entry because length standards have changed. That Journal entry about my recent trip to New York is a real heavyweight, with 100+ photos in it. Ten years ago, that would have been a three or four part feature in Life and Times. My 2015 trip to New York, which was a one-day outing, was originally a two-parter in Life and Times, though it has since been consolidated into a single page. I’m often concerned that the Journal will squeeze out Life and Times, because the subjects do sometimes overlap, and Journal entries tend to get a life of their own. That aforementioned New York entry was not supposed to be that long, but, you know, once you start writing, things kind of happen, and I end up with a monster Journal entry that took days to put together. I used to be able to knock one out in less than an hour. Then it started taking several hours. Now they often take a few days over several writing sessions. I suppose that’s why I now put out three or four Journal entries in a month rather than 15 or 20 like I used to. I may be putting out fewer entries these days, but the quality is way higher now compared to then.
I also credit the Journal for improving my skills as a writer. You saw those early News of the Week posts. They showed effort, but they kind of fell short. They look like the work of a much younger person. Nowadays, I’m more long-winded, and take more time to consider what I’m writing and I feel like I put out a much better product. The “Ah, yes, quality content,” meme rings more true in recent works than it did in older stuff. Some of that older stuff just straight up makes me cringe, but I have to remember that it was written during and for a certain time, and not only do times change, but I was also not the same person back then that I am now. I have more life experience now than I did then, and as such, perspectives change. It’s true what they say: everything is a product of its time. Some Journal entries have withstood the test of time and still sound good today, while others today seem quite dated, talking about issues and situations that stopped mattering a long time ago. Nowadays, I feel like I make better arguments and tell a more compelling story than I did originally. Even if you don’t necessarily agree with me, at least I am a better writer than I used to be.
I’ve often wondered, with the Journal’s larger size and importance in more recent years, what it would look like if I were to do another “clip show” photo set like “If These Streets Could Talk“. Recall that in that photo set, I went around DC and shot new material to link eleven older photo sets together in much the same way that TV shows do it when they make an episode that consists mostly of footage from older episodes. I pulled from both Life and Times and Photography sets, and ran 58 new photos with about 40 photos from the older material, with the new material’s largely covering the Old Post Office Building. Nowadays, I feel like Photography would be automatically out due to a change in its format that made its presentation a lot less wordy. Therefore, I would probably largely pull from the Journal as well as Life and Times, and figure out how to integrate Journal entries into a photo set. However, in looking over that “clip show” photo set again to jog my memory in order to do this Journal entry, I also recognized something else: that photo set was super cheesy. So don’t expect another one anytime soon, because the cheese factor was much too high.
It’s also interesting how the way that I’ve composed Journal entries has changed over the years. When I first started with the Journal, I created a simple web form to enter stuff into the database. No password or anything, just security through obscurity. That was about as simple as it got, though it did come with some consequences. First, I had to hand-code everything when I was writing in the Journal. There was no WYSIWYG interface, i.e. I was writing straight HTML into the form. If you’ve ever wondered why I tend to left-align images and such in the Journal, this is why, because that saved me time when I was banging out the image code by not having to write in code to center it. There’s nothing stopping me from centering images nowadays, but I feel like after this long, that’s my style when composing in the Journal, so I’ve kept that look. There was also no way to save my progress on the simple web form, so that tended to incentivize short posts, which the early years tended to bear out. I’m sure that my code probably gave more diehard HTML coders the vapors, but (A) it worked, and (B) it’s been cleaned up and done over properly in the intervening years. That lasted until the summer of 2007, when I changed to my current hosting service, DreamHost. There, I went from running the Journal out of a Microsoft Access database to having MySQL, and I had PHPMyAdmin as a backend. Now I had password protection, as well as a way to save my progress when writing, which enabled longer entries. However, I was still hand-coding the entries directly into the database, and therefore still whatever code made it look right the quickest, but at least it was being done in a more secure setting now. This, along with Facebook’s taking all of the really short posts, started incentivizing longer entries. Then in 2011 and 2012, I converted the site to run WordPress. So I was moving content from the old system over to the new system and cleaning up code in the process. I also reprocessed all of the images in the old entries from the originals in order to allow for enlargements. This was not done before when I was hand-coding because that was extra work that I didn’t want to do, coupled with the more “throwaway” nature of older Journal entries, but now I had a full-on CMS running things, which made things a little different. I consider the efforts to be worth it. But with WordPress powering the website, now I finally had a grown-up system that could do everything that you would want in a website. Though for the WordPress nerds out there, I still compose in TinyMCE. I’ve never used the Gutenberg block editor in any major way. I probably should eventually, because that’s the direction that WordPress seems to be moving.
I’ve also learned a few things over the years about what makes for good entries. First and foremost, unless it’s relevant to what you’re talking about, no one cares where you’re posting from. I definitely remember a few “Hello from the Infoshop” entries back in the day, and by and large, those entries kinda sucked. Yeah, you wrote it in the field rather than at your regular computer. Whoopee. That also went for a video entry that I did in 2010 where I was recording myself talking on the Metro. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but the entry on the whole was quite forgettable. Likewise, no one cares when you’re testing content tools, like one Journal entry where I was talking about whatever, with the big point of the entry being that I was writing it in an app. The entry was something of a loser, as the idea behind it kind of sucked. Nowadays, I will occasionally write with the WordPress/Jetpack app, but that’s usually only because I’m in a place where it makes sense, and I will never publish directly out of the app. I will always go back to a real computer for final publication. Another thing that I learned was that just because something works in one format doesn’t mean that it will succeed in another format. Video Journal entries were one case like that. I tried, but I didn’t feel like they put my best foot forward. I am a writer, not a videographer, and as such, the feature was quietly dropped, and I feel like that’s not a bad thing.
Then there were times that my colleagues at Food & Water Watch made suggestions for content, and how those were creatively declined. That’s how that “Alexes’ Alley” Journal entry came about. The two of them wanted to do their own recurring column on Schumin Web. I felt like it was completely out of place on my website, but I indulged them just a little bit because I was tired of hearing them ask me about it, essentially running it as a backdoor pilot, framing it as a demo. I think that it demonstrated two things: (A) their idea was kind of a loser, and (B) Schumin Web was not the place for it. Unsurprisingly, they never bothered to publish anything ever again in that format, because I’m pretty sure that my framing of their content the way that I did, which I absolutely did on purpose to drive home the point that this was a one-time thing, showed them that it couldn’t stand alone on its own two feet. In hindsight, I think that they were attempting to make fun of me in a somewhat mean-spirited way, but I got the last laugh in the end on that one, since I controlled the platform. Then there was another time when a colleague suggested that I run adult content on Schumin Web under the banner “Schumin Web After Dark”. That was a hard “no” from me, because that’s not how I wanted to use my brand. Granted, Schumin Web is not explicitly intended for children, and I do use some coarser language at times as my views about language use have evolved (you will likely never see me censor a word on here ever again, opting to either use the word uncensored, or phrase things so as not to use it at all), but it’s also not home to adult content. Not going there. Plus, in hindsight, I’m pretty sure that coworker was also trying to make fun of me in a mean-spirited sort of way. I put that to bed by running a Journal entry using that exact title about an evening at a bar, and there was a photo of them in it. That was the absolute end of it, because once you consider that when you put something out on the Internet, it’s out there forever, it became clear to them that if I ever used that brand again, their photo would come right up with it. And truth be told, if you Google it in quotes, the photo with them is the fourth result. Translated, you may think that you’re clever, but I ultimately control the platform. And the best part is that you, the viewer, never knew that the meaning of that title was essentially “fuck you” to a single person. And that’s the best kind of fuck-you to deliver, too, where I get useful content out of it, and only the intended recipient knows the true intent.
On that note, about how I control the platform, I also got the last laugh on a certain office prankster based on that. Do you remember the crazy pizza lady, who called me in the middle of the night trying to order pizza? In hindsight, I want to say that I was being pranked by a certain someone from my Food & Water Watch days. The reason that I think that was twofold: first, the former office prankster was the first one to try to talk me down from publishing all of the person’s information, unredacted, and tried very hard to get me to redact it after it was published. I didn’t make the connections at the time, simply declining to modify the post, but the realization hit me later on that he had written a check that his ass couldn’t cover, and now he was in damage control mode as I had put his friend’s phone number, along with all of their bad behavior, out in public for everyone to see. He might have been playing, but I wasn’t. It sort of confirmed to me that it was him when, a few months later, I searched the phone number from that caller in Facebook, and it came up with someone who had two mutual friends: the prankster, and his sister. Yep, thought so. Meanwhile, that Journal entry has now been up for over nine years, and he hasn’t tried to prank me again ever since. Good. He needed to grow up anyway.
So there you have it, I suppose. Happy twentieth anniversary to the Journal. I am looking forward to seeing what the next twenty (and then some) will look like as things continue to play out.
Categories: Schumin Web meta