Miscellany... Why Now?

MISCELLANY [mis.sel.iny] noun 1: A collection, medley, or mixture. 2: A collection of papers or treaties on a particular subject. 3: A volume or publication containing miscellaneous information of general interest on a variety of subjects. (Oxford English Dictionary)

Just after a decade after the "blog" was invented, it seems a little late to get into the game (See "Origins of 'Blog' and 'Blogger'"). Over the past decade, the Internet and the Web has become a part of everyday life. So different than when I was playing with it in 1994 on The Pipeline running a primitive web browser running on a beta version of Windows 95. To get to The Pipeline, we needed to use a modem to make a long distance call to New York City (area code 212). One of the first websites my wife and I visited was the Louvre. We visited the Louvre because back then it was one of the few websites that demonstrated what the potential of the web could be. Much before then, Bulletin Board Services, AOL, and CompuServe were the only options. Of course, we had accounts on all of them. Then the web became popular.

Like many others in the mid-nineties, having a personal webpage was the thing. From ourworld.compuserve.com (check it out in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine) to the fledging personal homepage / software and web business during grad school, we got caught up in the craze. Oldies but goodies include Collver Designs and The Life of Christ in Stained Glass. There even was a brief overview of the church year -- years before some of the great blogs out there now.

Somehow the blogging stuff passed me by (or I passed it by)... or rather life happend -- graduating, kids, moving, job, etc. During this time, we helped others create websites and blogs, but no blog for us to lay our head. So inspired some by Schott's Original Miscellany and the movie Julia & Julia, we have a blog containing miscellaneous information on a variety of topics.