Rediscovering Feedly

There are a couple of inspirations for this blog, but the most immediate is my rediscovery of Feedly.  I was Googling an old friend with whom I'd had a complicated relationship that didn't end well, and I came across a new blog that he had set up with his wife. There wasn't much content, but there were a few pictures, and it was a small window into his life that I appreciated, even though I didn't want to intrude or even let him know I was looking. I decided to subscribe unobtrusively by RSS, and with fond memories of Google Reader, went looking for whatever the modern day app-enabled equivalent was. The most promising-looking option was Feedly, and when I signed in smoothly with the Google account integration, I was delighted to find that I had, at some point before completely forgetting that Feedly existed, imported all of my RSS feeds from Google Reader. 

I used to spend hours upon hours digesting feeds about economics, technology, data security, programming, cooking, and music, and enjoying the posts from the 20 or so friends of mine who kept blogs. And when I opened Feedly, they were all there, right where I had left them. It was fascinating to see which blogs were still being updated and which were extinct, and gratifying to find that the feeds that were relevant to me then were still far more interesting than the algorithmic banalities that Google News and Facebook had been serving up in the meantime. I aspire to have time for podcasts, but RSS is much easier for me to digest.

And it got me thinking about blogging again. I kept a blog all through college and up until I went to law school, but didn't share it with many people. It was my private space, and it felt too personal at some point, and I took it down and encrypted the backup at a moment when I felt it was too much to maintain the private server where I had hosted it. I don't know where that file went, or what the encryption key would be if I ever found it. Maybe someday it could be recovered, but for now, it's a loss to me, because looking back, I would like to have had that window into my younger self, just like the window into my friend of that era's life. I'll never be that age again, experiencing those experiences again, and my memory isn't that good (for better or for worse). But I'll never be this age again either, experiencing these experiences, and I decided that if I want to look back without regret 10, 20, 30 years from now, I should start blogging again.

So here I am, using Blogger this time (true nostalgia -- I hope they don't shut it down) in the hope that this blog will be preserved better than I could preserve it, and writing openly to a small audience (currently just me) for reminiscence and posterity. Thank you Feedly, and thank you Google.