19 Years of Weblog

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager.

Today marks the 19th year since the first entry I wrote in this weblog. That’s a long time to do anything, much less something electronic and ephemeral like this. Our first entry was about spotted salamanders, on December 27, 2004.

Some years ago we switched hosts for this site and imported only a fraction of old posts, so you can only go back to mid-2011 on the current site. But the first five years I have in the form of a book that Denise made for me. It’s called “Crow’s Nest: Select Photos & Writings from Five Years of Blogging,” though in my head the title is the same as the cover photo: “Looking West at Dawn.”

Photo: Daniel Barringer

This unofficial title suggests to me that the weblog looks in places other than the obvious to see things that are otherwise overlooked, and I hope the weblog has done some of that. Writing it has been a joy because I love to share Crow’s Nest Preserve with others, whether in person or in writing.

Photo: Daniel Barringer

I think of the weblog as a kind of writing located on a continuum between very short and simple (such as most social media) and long and complex like a novel or textbook. We have the room to stretch out here, to look a little deeper, but it’s still brief and yet I hope inspires more investigation.

I try to add entries regularly, though you may guess that during our busiest seasons for land management I don’t keep up with writing as often.

You may see over the coming year a reprise of some of these early entries, perhaps with updates, since they’re otherwise lost to time (we only printed a couple copies of the book, and then there are the lost years in between that and the current web page). And I think that something I wrote 15 years ago can safely be discussed again without being repetitive. I have 130,000 photos from the last 23 years to pull from so look for more soon. I hope you enjoy reading these entries as much as I do writing them.