Alexander von Humboldt in the library of his apartment at Oranienburger Straße 67 in Berlin, 1856. I live two kilometers away, but I’m not quite there yet.
My content now lives on my site – more than ever, that is. Over the past few weeks, I’ve created a new space on this website where I can keep a collection of almost “everything” I’ve ever published online, and one where I can write journal-like “notes.” Here’s what to expect and why I did this.
Everything: All there is from me
I love putting stuff online. Since I was 16 (that’s 20 years ago), I’ve been doing so – on now-dead forums, now-dead social networks, and surprisingly still-alive blogs. Seeing the things I created online makes them better, I find. I’ve shared photos I took from my high school at 16, work with which I applied for art school at 18, and enjoyed documenting my master’s thesis (2014) and a fellowship (2016) almost daily. And over the last 16 years, I’ve learned to love and then mourn Twitter.
For these ~1,100 posts from my past, I created an archive called “Everything.”
It includes:
- 493 tweets that I posted first as @lisacrost (2009–2021), then as @lisacmuth
- 204 photos from an old Blogger blog from when I was 16–18 years old
- 170 drawings from an old Blogger blog from when I was 17–19 years old
- 25 posts documenting an internship at Bloomberg in New York City in 2013, originally on Tumblr
- 99 posts documenting designing my Master’s Thesis in 2014 (Tumblr)
- 133 posts documenting my OpenNews fellowship in 2016 (Tumblr)
- 131 posts documenting my research for the book on colors I’m writing (>2021), originally on Notion
- 14 (so far) book reviews from Goodreads
- 12 thoughts about data vis books I read for the Data Vis Book Club, from the written discussions about those books.
I curated. Many of my 5,100+ tweets are boring (“Don’t miss our data vis meetup tomorrow!”), so I only kept the ones I want to preserve for the future. You won’t find replies or pure retweets in there, either. The same goes for my drawings and the photos I took as a teenager: I hope I hit a sweet spot between showing authentically how 17-year-old Lisa saw the world and showing stuff that’s still interesting somehow.
Notes: My little corner of the internet
On “Everything,” you’ll also find the 30 posts that I shared over the past three months in another new section of my website: “Notes.” This is where you can watch me share sometimes boring, always unpolished thoughts. I upload photos I took that day or the day before, doodles, book reviews, visual experiments, and work in progress. (Here’s a full article on how I’m using RSS to post to this Jekyll blog on my phone, if you’re interested in that.)
What I’m doing there is different from what I usually do. When I write on the Datawrapper blog and on social media, I think a lot about you: what you’ll find interesting or useful or fun. I research, structure and restructure, edit and proofread — all so that you get to read something that’s as valuable as I can create. I enjoy doing so, and it makes me really happy to know that you enjoy reading it.
“Notes,” however, is my little corner of the internet. It’s a small, cozy room of my own where I go if I don’t want to think about you for a while. Here, I write for myself. I still censor myself — this is the internet, after all, not my actual journal or best friend — but I post lots of things that wouldn’t feel right as a proper article, on the Datawrapper blog, or on social media.
That said: I won’t mind guests! Do visit my little room, or at least peek through the window from time to time. In fact, I created an RSS feed for you to do just that.
ROOTS before POSSE
Why am I doing all this? Because I got inspired by the concept of POSSE: “Publish on your own, syndicate elsewhere.” For me, ROOTS is the logical first step toward that: “Return Old Online Things to your own Site” (yes, I made this up). Why? If I do decide to delete my X account or if Blogger gets quietly discontinued, then I don’t care: it’s all on my site already. I own it. It’s all Markdown files and images that I can back up anywhere I want.
You’ll see me POSSE (or PESOS – “Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate (to your) Own Site”) in the future, too: If I post a Goodreads review, it’ll also be on my Notes and Everything pages. If I post on LinkedIn, it’ll be there, too. Everything I create and find important will eventually end up on my website.
Bonus: No more cookies for you!
If you’ve been on my website before, you might notice that something else has changed: I don’t have a cookie warning anymore. I deleted my Google Analytics tracking code. And I only show you those old Disqus comments on articles where they existed, and only if you agree to it. So: I don’t know if two people read my notes (my mom and I) or hundreds. I like that.
Head over to Everything to stroll around my posts, or have a look at the new Notes. I hope you enjoy the two new sections.
