Right now, I am watching Magnum P.I., which let’s face it, is crass populist television, but at its best. I remember watching this show as a kid, and I’ve got to admit the Ferrari helped (I loved cars as a kid, mechanics son and all that), but even now it seems quite fun. It has aged better than say Knightrider.

That is not the reason for this post however, I am sure I could fire up a poem – but I ended up watching it after flicking through the channels in the mood for something nostalgic. It all started with an email, from Yahoo, they are closing down Geocities, and it was their umpteenth reminder that I should go and download my website there, or transfer it to their paid for hosting service.

It is quite shocking to think about, I have been a member of Geocities since probably around 1996/7, it was a fantastic service in the beginning and was the host of my first ever website, launching me into the internet age in style (well how much style, or even content, was involved is an arguable matter considering I was fifteen at the time).

Over time, I’ve always had some kind of web presence there, even if it is just to leave an old site loitering about.  Back in the early days I used to have a site in Area 51, back when GeoCities was made up of Neighbourhoods, which I used to write about sci-fi television, but that site is long forgotten in the annals of history. The site currently there has not been touched since 2002, most of it since 2001. It was a site to host all my poetry and writings, and anything else of interest such as my studies into history.

I’ve been on this morning and downloaded all the pages, while I was there, I found a site from 2007 called Aspiring (which must have been when I was between hosts), which was a very early prototype of a site I wanted to do, it was going to be a poetry ezine, much in the flavour of the Creative Edge, (which many moons ago was the ezine created, and edited by Imdaewen for writers-ramblings.com forum – this site’s precursor). I would still love, one day, to launch an ezine, but one thing at a time. So, now I have the whole website saved to my computer, the big question is, what do I do with it? Well the poetry, though it is old (most of it from my late teens, early twenties), I’m going to put in a section on here. The stories, I’m going to redo them, from scratch. They are atrociously written, the level of spelling and grammar mistakes is appalling, and the concepts were born of an age of innocence about writing and storytelling – though one, which never really got past chapter three, I’m still quite thrilled with for all its faults.

Everything else, well I guess that goes to the scrap heap of history, though I am a hoarder so for the next decade it will probably drift around on this hard drive, or that hard drive, maybe a DVD backup occasionally – where eventually I’ll stumble across it, and have all these thoughts again. That is the way of most of my digital life, I am in fact loathe to delete anything. Ironic then, that this all started because I was doing the rare job of actually deleting some of the emails in my main account, when I noticed the previously ignored warning about my GeoCities account.

I’m off to go start working on an area on this site to archive my older poetry (hopefully without clogging up my journal, or my blog homepage).

And farewell GeoCities, your demise is the end of an era. From an old Homesteader, ta-ra.

Big thanks to Bargain Host for that.

Normal service will be resumed next week, and I’ll get some posts going again by mid-week. I’ll get some of the missing poetry from my daily poetry posted in a single post too.

I was getting a wee bit worried I’d have to rebuild my blog. I do have database back ups though, so somehow I would have saved my content (which probably isn’t great, but means a lot to me.)

I am definately feeling more committed to this blog than any other. That said, I have done a lot of little bits and bobs technically to get the site where I want it, which has distracted from actual writing things to go in said blog.

Well that changes now, I’m reasonably confident technically I won’t be making anymore changes.

I’ve now set the theme, and it won’t be changing for a while (well a few months, I’d like to have some kind of rotation system through the seasons – however with the intent of getting some content bedded in, this won’t start until Autumn).

I’ve also added an image gallery system, the native images system just had one folder – galleries let me break things down. When more photos are uploaded, I’ll add albums – so “Days out”, “Holidays”, “Admin”, “Friends”, that kind of thing. I think I also need to set myself a three month rotation of clearing up images, making sure they’re tagged, commented, and that sort of thing. I am however using the galleries here to replace my LiveJournal Scrapbook, just because I have more control here, and unlike Facebook, no one can remove the rights to my own photo’s from here.

My posts now automatically get ported over to my LiveJournal (unless I don’t want them to), this will hopefully keep it in my friends mind, and if they know people that would be interested in this blog, they can point them at it. Plus, what I post here was what I aimed to post there anyway – so it all works out.

I’ve added a Twitter sidebar widget – this hopefully keeps things a bit personal, because I don’t want to come across as just a blogger, this also doubles as my personal site in relation to the subject of creativity. Balancing the two is what’s important really.

Added a few links, but I really want to go through my vast bookmarks and pull all the relevant ones into a page on here, to share.

Added my Social Networking sites to the list – most of which I’m happy to add visitors to my blog to.

Added a plug-in that allows my site to have a different theme, and set of functions on a mobile phone. Makes for smaller, quicker (and therefore cheaper) page loads. I doubt there will be many people logging on to the site from their mobiles, however I do, I can write draft of posts using my phone, which is great for mobile blogging. This means I can use some of the time I spend travelling by bus each day to get some content written. It would only ever be draft, but they are things to build on. I’ve already started doing this, and it works.

There are more things I’d like to develop, but content is top priority, then acquiring regular readers (I can dream), and at some point in the future I’d like to do more work to encourage people to write (which was always aim of the now sadly retired aspiring.org (and writers-ramblings.com before that) forums. Maybe do a competition every now and again.

Anyway, that’s enough about what I’ve done, and what I’d like to do with the blog.

I’ll say this though, I’m very much impressed with WordPress, it’s a dream to write in, a dream to set up, and a dream to add extra functionality and design to. I think I’ll be using this for the other blog I’m intending.

I struggled with what would be the first post. It should be prolific after all this time, right? Grand in nature. Broad in scope. So, I struggled. Should I be business like, or should I be all pally? I struggled some more. And then I realized it’s just like walking into a room full of people you’ve never met – I’ll introduce ourselves to you. It’s the only polite thing to do, right?

My name is Jonathan L. Lawrence (yep the name’s in the banner, so you’ll never forget), I go by a few nicknames, for this blog I’ve chosen JL Legend, a monicker coined where I work, an ironic confidence booster. This is also my name on Twitter, if you want to follow my micro-blogging.

I’m a Business Analyst by trade, but in my spare time I’m (deep breaths this is coming straight from the banner),  writer, poet, artist, geek, among other things. I’ll admit, I’m not the shit at one of these, but I aspire to be – and that’s what this blog is about, my aspirations. Now, the benefit of having a blog is that I can show case what I can do, and pretend I know what I’m doing. I do have some clue, I’ve been plying myself at the creative arts for fifteen years now, ever since I was a teenager. I’ve studied in school, in college, in my spare time when I started work (and shhh over the years occaisionally at work too – though obviously not in my current job *psst anyone from work looking?).

So, you have an idea of who I am, you kind find out more specifics in the About section. You also know why I’m posting (no it’s not just to further my ego by having JL Legend plastered everywhere across the site!), it’s showcase what I can do, to diarise where I’m going, and where I’ve come from, to offer what advice I can, commentaries on the creative world, and the news around it. I might also throw in a review or two of books, such old and new. It’s not all about me (damn the world not revolving round me!)

I encourage anyone to comment (if you’re not a spam bot, or a sweaty, greasy, puberty waiting troll), I love comments, makes my day to hear my inbox ping. You can also email me at lex-a-like [at] [dot] aspiring.org, or through the comments page. The more the merrier.