My Christianity and my blogging are intertwined. In 2002, I had an interest in web development and started a website of my own to house my HTML hacking and learning. Trying to come up with a name was the hardest part of it, and I sat with a cup of coffee thinking of a name. I rarely add cream, but this time I did. Must have been either a flavored coffee or a bad coffee someone gifted to me.
The swirls that developed astounded me! I thought the coffee swirls were so cool! And then I realized that CoffeeSwirls should be the name of the website. That has been my online name for everything ever since then. Gaming, social media, email, you name it.
In 2003, I embarked on a Bible reading plan and that gave me a reason to do something with my website other than just learn about casting style sheets and elements of web design. That gave me a chance to use my love of writing in an effort to shut my dad up. No, really. That was my motivation! Here’s my testimony if you want to see it.
That isn’t exactly how the project ended up, thank God, but that was my motivation. I had a weekly newsletter and a daily blog where I shared my thoughts over each day’s reading. I had subscribers. I gained some notoriety. I met friends who got to know me and identified me as a baby Christian, not as the expert that some made me out to be. I never claimed that role, but somehow when you are publishing things to a website people assume quite a bit.
I stumbled upon some printed newsletter pages from 2002 today. I’m considering a project where I go through them to recreate the lost posts from twenty years ago. This was a “read the Bible in a calendar year” project though, and we are halfway into January now.
Why does that matter? Maybe I have a touch of OCD. Maybe I just think that there is a proper order for things. If I wait eleven months to do this, it likely won’t happen. If I do it now and link the posts here and on Gab, it will be out of sync and I’ll probably do more than one day of old posts per day of today. Time traveling can be confusing, so don’t mind that last sentence. In fact, this entire paragraph has been an internal decision-making process inside my head. My apologies for that.
So I need to thank my dear, departed grandmother Doris for collecting all of my posts in paper form and I need to thank my mother, Irene, for gathering them for Doris and then saving them for me after the passing of my grandmother. These posts will be dated to their original dates. The only way you’ll know about them is if they spur on a thought in 2022 Doug’s mind. Short thoughts go to Gab. Longer thoughts go here and are then linked to Gab. An RSS reader and a Gab membership is the best combo if you want to follow my content. Maybe try the email update box on this website too. I keep forgetting to remember that one.
I mentioned that I had stumbled on these pages of old content. That is because I am supposed to be packing stuff together to get them out of the way before the carpet guys come. We have a couple of weeks, but if we wait until the day before, it won’t be pretty. So with that, I’m signing off.
