Excessive

Yes, this is the 1000th entry that I've made on Excessive Rambling, over five long years of almost daily writing of everything from the food I've eaten, the people I've been with, and the ways that I'm feeling. I'm really quite proud of what I've done here; a massive collection - basically a history of my life for the last five years, with so many details since it was written in the form of a daily journal.

Five years ago there was no such thing as a blog, myspace, barely anyone knew what a livejournal was, and being all over the internet was still pretty nerdy, but for some reason I really wanted a journal, and I wanted it to read by people other than just myself, and so I set out to create a place that was simple, that I could easily write on, and that people could easily read, and the many forms of Excessive Rambling were created.

It started out as a horrible looking black page with red text, with no menus, pictures, sections or anything beyond a front page with writing. When I first created and opened the place, I only wrote about once a week or less, and it was more of a when I remember it existed type place. I was still in highschool, and I was still with Leighann at the time, so I was relatively busy. At this point, the Excessive Rambling wasn't really anything but a hopeful idea with some potential.

As highschool went on and Leighann fucked me over and I started to be come generally angry at everything, needing some form of outlet started to become obvious, and I took what I had made and revamped it to make it a bit more useable, readable and attractive, and I redesigned the page to be simple but effective. It actually looked a lot like how it does now, but it was a white background with plain black text... I was going for the simplified look, what can I say. At the time I was heavily into VB programming, so the way that I wrote entries was both manually by editing the HTML and the uploading the page afterwards (to my rogers webspace) and eventually through a program that would open the source code, add in the entry I wrote (with auto-formatting and things) and then save it, and then I would manually upload it still. There were a few problems with this, as while I was writing more often at this point, there were times when there would be an error with the FTP and I would lose the entry or overwrite the wrong file while uploading, so while it worked, it wasn't the easiest thing in the world, but it worked, so I kept at it, and this layout (and version) of the site lasted for a good couple of years, through a lot of the time I lived at Wavell and through a lot of the time that I was with Linzie.

As I was writing more and more, and back entries started to clog the site a bit, I decided to redesign the layout into something a bit more creative but also still simple, so I took some time and designed a layout that looked very close to how it does now, with blues and dark blues, and the picture of the crazy monkey that Owen drew me. This version of the site lasted the longest, from when I was with Linzie all the way to the summer when Emily moved in with me, and the site was still run the same way as always, through manually updating the site (easily using Arachnophilia's easy to use macro system) and then uploading it to the FTP server (now hosted on my good friend Tony's web server that went through a few name changes). This was when I manually created archive pages, made lots of spelling mistakes, and really wrote like I was an angry teenager (WHY?!). When I think of Excessive Rambling, this is the time that comes to mind the most, simply because it was around the longest, and because it was a very memorable time in my life.

Around the time Emily moved in with me, I took it upon myself to begin learning some basic PHP and I quickly discovered that I could really make some interesting things using relatively easy code, and I sat down for almost three months working and working on a PHP based content management website, where writing entries was all done online, rather manually done through uploading to an FTP, and after a lot of hard work, a very crude and rough PHP based content management system had become the fourth version of Excessive Rambling. Not only did it feature easy to use entry writing, it also feature the ability for readers to leave comments for the first time. The layout stayed basically the same, except a few things were added as required, like the links to read and leave comments, as well as the links for me to add entries, but other than that I kept it basically the same.

About two years go by and I continually create projects using PHP and one day in February 2006 I decide to really teach myself MySQL (for some reason, I don't remember why) and after spending a few days learning it, something just clicked and I realized that I could completely revolutionize the way I run my site and the way my site works, and so I decided that after a bit of research, I would undertake a 100% complete rewrite on my site, and remake it from the ground up. It took me an entire month of working about 10 hours a day, seven days a week to create the new version, but what I created I am still proud of to this day. A website with completely integrated account system, automated archives, comments, a message board, extremely customizable code, the ability to create various levels of private entries, as well as the ability to IP ban users from viewing the website, and the giant list goes on. It was the most complex and well written work I had ever done, and I had completely changed the way I run the website, and the way people view it. This is still the version that's in use today (although I've fixed and added a few things) and I can't ever really see a reason to change the back-end system. So that's the journey that my website has taken over the years and how it got to the way it is now.

While that is the history of the system that is my website, the history of my writing is a bit more interesting to some. In the beginning, this place was really just a place for me to go when I was angry and bitch and complain about whatever it was I was angry about, instead of confronting or yelling at the person I was actually mad at; basically a place for me to vent without harming anyone. Naturally, the place wasn't that active at first, considering everything written was just angry rants about things no one actually cared about, and that lasted for about the first year or so. After I had decided that I was going to use the website as an actual journal and I did the first layout redesign, that's when my writing changed a bit. It went from ranting, to ranting but with more details about what else I had done in the day. I would complain about school, but then I would also talk about what I had for breakfast, what I watched on TV and things like that, and for some reason people were more interested in those kinds of things than anything, and that's when people started to read my site (for whatever reason). When Linzie and I would get in a fight, or if I was upset about something specific, I would write in detail about it and how I felt, as well as what I had done that day, so there are many many detailed things written in the first couple years of entries. Also to note, I used a lot more swear words to convey feelings and ideas back then, so it may have made the writing seem more angry, or simply more passionate, however I blame my youth for the excessive swearing, and resent when people claim I use to write more passionately, when I was just obviously writing like a teenager in high school.

After I had finished high school, my writing did lose a lot of the anger that had previously been there, and what was left was more of a detailed event list of my days, which was probably my favorite style of writing that I've put on my site, but there were times when something specific had happened and I had to write something about it, and so those were instances when a particularly angry entry or rant would have been made still.

As time went on and I continued with the daily details type of entry, I also started making the entires a bit more graphically intensive, posting images related to whatever I was talking about in the entry (something I had rarely, if ever done before) as well as taking and posting pictures of myself using a webcam I had bought. This would be what I call the third type of writing, when I started to use images to convey messages, jokes and feelings, as well as the writing. This style of writing lasted up until the time when Emily left me, and started to dwindle when Nick moved in and I was seeing Vanessa. Around that time I still posted some photo's, but not nearly as many, and my use of images started to lessen to an extent, but I continued to make quite lengthly entries detailing the events of my day and how I felt throughout them.

Starting with the new year, and the most recent remake of Excessive Rambling, my writing style has changed into what I like to call more of a 'grown up' mode, where I rarely, if ever, post an image, and I rarely swear. My view towards what I was writing was a bit more mature or even more professional, and I used less jokes, less profanity and overall just outgrew the whole angry entry kinda thing.

Lately my desire and ability to write entries has dwindled almost away, and I rarely write an entry over 300 words, and if I do, they never involve images. It could be because I never actually do anything worth writing about, but it could also be because I've been doing this for over five years now, and I've think I've written every combination of words possible. I know that in the future the frequency and average length of my entries will increase again, but for right now I'm okay with how they are.

I've always tried to be as honest as possible when writing entries, tried not to over exaggerate or anything. I've also always tried to throw in a bit of humor when I write, usually put in brackets after a sentence, or done in an obvious way so people know I'm being silly. Basically, I've always been aware that there are going to be people reading what I'm writing, so I try to make it interesting, so that people will want to keep reading what I've written, and so that people will come back, because without an audience, what's the point of having a publicly viewable website. So many people write boring blogs filled with boring paragraphs filled with boring sentences, filled with boring punctuation that aren't compelling, emotional, interesting, or funny. I basically take what I hate about reading other people's journal's and then try my best to take all that out of what I do, and it seems to work pretty well. On top of it all, I've always been okay with what I've done because I know that even if no one at all read what I wrote, at least I would have a day to day history of my life I could look back on at any time, to see what I did on this day three years ago, or maybe twenty years from now I can show my kids what I had written when I was in high school. It's basically a giant history of my life, and to me, that's amazing, and it will always be my motivation for continuing my writing.

Yes, there has been 1000 entries describing every little detail of my life, what I've done and how I've felt while doing it, and I expect there will be thousands more as time goes on, and I hope that some of you reading this will be there with me in the future still giving me a reason to put in jokes! I appreciate everyone who takes the time to read what I've wrote, and anyone who takes the time to leave me comments about what I've written. Who knows what will change about this place in the future, what kind of layout redesign I'll think of next, or if I'll ever rebuild the place from scratch... I guess the only thing that matters is that I don't ever plan on stopping this. So... stick with me!

Talk to everyone soon!

2247 words

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