I forgot about the 10th anniversary of this blog!
I realised yesterday that this blog has been active (well, active by my standards) for over 10 years now. I started posting in July 2011. I'm not entirely sure why but that made me happy. Very happy. There have been ups and downs and I don't post regularly. I don't know what I was on in 2015 but I posted 113 times that year, the most in an year so far and this year was by far the worst, with only 5 posts. What can I say, there are times when I feel like I have a lot to say and times when I don't.
I've changed how this blog looks a number of times and I decided to use the Wayback Machine to look at how this blog has looked over the past decade.
Here's how it looked in April of 2013. I was, and still am, a big fan of Batman and the background image is by Yale Stewart who created the JL8 comic strip. The "title" or name of the blog has also changed over the decade and I guess I called it "The Nameless Journal" in 2013, for whatever reason. Notice the g+ icon. I completely forgot about Google Plus.
I don't know if anyone has discovered the problem with the above screenshot. Look closely and you will find a 2019 picture of me in a blogpost from 2013. Must be a bug in the Wayback Machine.
Here's how things looked mid 2014. By this point I changed the title to "An Eternal Student" and removed the background image I guess. This also made me remember my other blog - beatsnmore.blogspot.com. That blog doesn't exist anymore and the link points to a snapshot on the Wayback Machine from 2016. For reasons that are not obvious to me at the moment, I felt the strong urge to share everything I favorited on YouTube so I setup an automated blog using IFTTT. I eventually deleted the blog, maybe because of broken integrations between IFTTT and YouTube, if I recall correctly.
The title changed again in early 2015 but the look of the blog mostly stayed the same. It looks like I had invited a few of my friends to be become co-authors of this blog and I got them to write posts about their specific fields of interest. I think Ritwika wrote about Computational Biology and Shruti Patel wrote about Particle Physics. Shruti defended her PhD in Particle Physics and was a Post-Doctoral Fellow last time I chatted with her. I think Ritwika is still pursuing her PhD. I haven't talked to either of them in a long time.
And finally, we jump ahead to late 2016. I had graduated from college by this point, which is why the tag line had changed to "...(ex-)science ...". It looks like I got a few more of my friends to write posts on this blog - Venugopal also on Particle Physics and Preeti on Ecology (whom I finally married in May of this year). I stay in touch with Venugopal from time to time. He too defended his PhD in Particle Physics and is a Post-Doctoral Fellow.
I need to make a note to regularly save the state of this blog (and my personal website) on the Wayback Machine. I'm going to go now, catch up on JL8. Until next time ...