Welcome To My Ogblog

What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Welcome to my website; Ogblog. Ogblog is the home for my various diaries, logs and scribblings, which go back many decades. The postings cover travel, theatre, music, cricket, tennis, writing and more besides. Think of it as an experiences site. Or a “life” site.

I have been blogging new events (yes, I do intend still to have a life) since December 2015. But I’ve also started working on retro-blogging my old content and uploading that. There are hundreds of retro-blog samples going all the way back to 1974, when I started keeping diaries and logs. Indeed some recovered memories date from earlier than that. 

The whole thing is a cross between an old git’s multi-media diary and a live blog. Hence the title Ogblog.

Navigating Ogblog can be a bit of a challenge, especially if you are only interested in certain bits. Here’s some help. If you look down the right-hand side of a page (or skim below the page you are reading if on a phone/tablet), you can see:

  • the five most recent posts (posts are dated, diary-like, to when the event happened, so this will always show live blog postings, not retro-blog pieces);
  • five random posts, for those who like serendipity (strangely popular);
  • subject categories, such as cricket, travel, music, theatre etc. Clicking one of those narrows the blog down to just that subject, but still showing most recent first;
  • a tag cloud of the key words within the postings – people, places , things… (narrower than subject categories, still showing most recent first for each tag);
  • archives by date, especially useful for the retro-blog element if a particular period from the dim and distant past interests you;
  • the five most recent comments.

Enthusiastic Ogblog readers can subscribe and thus get an e-mail alert whenever I make a posting, be it live blog or retro-blog from days of yore. The easiest way to become a subscriber is to make a comment on any posting and tick the box asking to subscribe. You won’t be bombarded with other stuff – this is not a commercial venture, but when I’m having a blogging frenzy you might get quite a few e-mails from Ogblog on the same day.

My use of the internet and the web goes back decades; for example my photo archive and family video archive have been public on Flickr and YouTube for many years. Ogblog is the place on the web where I pull my content together.

I haven’t yet worked out all the things I’m going to do with this site; that’s where you come in. Your comments and thoughts on my content will help me and perhaps I can also help you. I genuinely welcome contributions (there are many guest pieces on Ogblog now), suggestions, questions and ideas; please do get in touch and/or comment on individual pieces.

Ian Harris.