Archives Done for Now

Update October 13, 2009:

Scott, the owner of the South End Zone web site, has sent me the text of all of my old columns, so I have more archiving to do. There were apparently 102 of them on the SEZ site. I have added a few already, but there still must be at least 30 of them that I have not posted here yet. I will try to finish that up by next week some time.

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After searching email files on 3 computers, I found lots of my old South End Zone articles and a couple of posts of interest (probably only to me) that pre-dated my South End Zone columns. I only have 3 articles from 1999, none from 2000, and only 1 from 2001, so there are obvious holes in my archives, and those were interesting times. I wish I could find them. I will check around with the owner of South End Zone and maybe with a few friends to see if I can rustle up any of the missing articles, but otherwise I am done with the archiving and will concentrate on new postings. One is currently in the works.

Going through old email files, it struck me that blogging is, fundamentally, a self-indulgent exercise, probably more so than writing a regular column. With a regular column, you write it, some people read it at the time, and then it goes down the memory hole and you move on to the next article. But now that I am a blogger, more or less, the format is different, and the assumption is that everything gets preserved. I will apply labels to the posts or articles, so you can look up (if you are so inclined) any older articles I wrote that focused on Bob Harlan, or on the Seahawks, or other teams. So the whole body of my blog entries will be on display and somewhat readily searchable.

Having spent this time searching for copies of old articles about games that happened long ago, the question naturally arises: who cares if I can find some old article from the 1990's? Almost nobody is going to spend time reading them now, except for me. But even if these old articles are of very little interest to anyone else, they have some sentimental value to me.

I came up with everything from a 1995 recollection of Brett Favre's first extensive action with the Packers in 1992 (here), my first article for the South End Zone in 1997 (here), and my rant about franchise free agency (here). Other personal favorites include my report on the game that signaled to me that the Packers really were contenders, the playoff game against the 49ers after the 1995 season (here), my recollections when Ray Nitschke died (here), and the column I dedicated to my Dad the week he died (here). So feel free to read some of these if they are of interest. I will try to blog regularly enough to have some continuity.