Meta Blog: Saving Face

During a recent NPR fund drive our local public radio station played a lot "best of" programming from A Prairie Home Companion, This American Life, Democracy Now and so on and so forth.

It was really interesting to hear the Ira Glass and Garrison Keillor of 5 and 10 years ago. Not only has the climate changed in which they are broadcasting allowing or demanding changes in subject matter, but their diction and voices have changed. Ira Glass has become, well, smoother, more confident and less whiny, though I still think of him as having an iconic whine. Garrison Keillor has become more middle American, less Minnesota and mainstream USA, though I still think of him as a Saint Paul kind of guy. I wonder how much of my interpretation of these individuals is based on my first encounters with their programs and how much is actually based on their programs today.

I realized, while listening to the radio that Sunday that once upon a time these guys were young bloods, maverick radio pioneers, doing something which must have felt more like a crazy experiment in earning a paycheck than an institution in the American intellectual landscape.

In a similar vein, although, admittedly my little blog isn't as well produced as either of these programs, yet (wink wink), I have purposefully begun taking to only republishing my index (main page for you non-bloggers) and not my entire site when I make changes to my css template or profile picture. Any post that I wrote 6 months ago, when pulled up from the archive, should look just as it did 6 months ago, old profile picture and all. And any comments I have posted to other blogs in the past will display my old profile pictures.

In a year or two from now, provided I am still at this blogging thing, one could hypothetically go back through my old posts and have a visual record of how I have changed physically over the course of time to reinforce the equally inevitable changes in my ideas and writing style.