Coming to terms with the old Doobybrain

I used to think the internet was forever. That everything you wrote, submitted, posted, and interacted with online was somehow transformed into a data set that lasted for eternity, beyond my own death.

A part of me still thinks that, but I’ve witnessed huge chunks of the internet that I knew as a kid disappearing forever. There are a few reasons I can think of quickly: site owners passing away, site ownership being bought/sold, life changes contributing to a site’s slow demise… You get the idea. Life happens and eventually, unless there’s a lot of money involved behind the scenes, little guys like me eventually lose a bit of steam.

An ominous email

January 4, 2025 - the day I said bye to an old friend

Doobybrain was started in 2002, in the earliest days of my internet use, when communication was simple and people checked email maybe just once or twice a day. AIM was the chat tool of my peers (texting wasn’t a regular thing) and a blog was just a recently coined internet term that really meant this kid spends a lot of time at the computer.

Early Doobybrain.com days

Doobybrain was, at first, a static HTML page, humbly edited nearly every day by me in Macromedia Dreamweaver. I would add bits of my internet findings to this HTML page until it seemed arbitrarily long for scrolling, and then I would manually make another HTML page linking to the previous one (and so on and so forth). It was laborious but it was fun and eventually, my site grew enough that I converted over to WordPress.

The WordPress age last a long time from what I recall. It was the first real transformation of my site into a blog that handled linking and ads without much input needed from me. It was WordPress that allowed me to grow the site even more and get it in front of hundreds of thousands of readers. It changed my life in a way (I moved to California because of it, which is kind of another story for another day).

But with WordPress came the first phase of letting go of Doobybrain. All of those HTML pages I made didn’t transfer over to the new site at the time. Those HTML pages were saved forever on a 3.5” floppy disk that I lost a long time ago (I do wish I had those archives). And so a small part of me just accepted it even though the early data-hoarder in me didn’t like it.

Eventually, WordPress became a bit of a chore and I switched the site over to Squarespace where yet again, the WordPress archives didn’t really survive online. I have those archives, but they are forever locked away in the WordPress format that is only available in incomplete pieces on The Internet Archive. I did not like having to start-over because of the change in site hosting/format.

What I’ve Learned

This site currently is still on Squarespace, but I have started fresh. The previous Doobybrain-on-Squarespace was not my favorite to be honest which is why it became so easy to neglect. It seemed monotonous, voice-less, and more quick to post without any thought whatsoever. I think of it as my version of Twitter even though I was simultaneously posting on Twitter at the time. I just didn’t know where the website Doobybrain fit in anymore and it really made me sad.

And so it took me over a year to realize I just had to let it go in order for me to begin writing again. All the worries of “breaking the internet” due to hyperlinks going to 404 pages just…had to be. It was the life-cycle of the internet that I had begun to experience more and more so why be so precious about preserving my own digital fingerprints? Like all life, the internet has a death as well and maybe I’m coming to terms with an old version of myself going away forever, unable to be indexed, searched, or read by anybody ever again.

Here I go (again)

Hello.

It has been a very, very, very long time.

I don't really have a reason for why my blogging took such a big hiatus but I think it had to do with me coming to terms with the internet itself changing. It's been such a weird place for me in the last few years with micro-blogging platforms and social media becoming the forefront of the personal identity. Name one platform and I've probably used it (well, except for maybe TikTok) over the years, all in the attempt to make some sense of the rapidly changing world of over-sharing and visual stimulation.

I got tired. I got tired of blogging quickly. I got tired of filtering through the immense garbage that was coming to the front of social media. My body and my mind just got exhausted from it all. It got exhausting and eventually, it wasn't fun anymore.

But I really missed writing. Not to you, the reader, but instead to nobody in particular. I miss just putting my thoughts down in a public place with no real intention of anybody reading it. I have this wild dream that one day, if all things are paid correctly forever and ever, that somebody will come across this site and discover all the great things I did (just a few years later). It's the old "StumbleUpon" feeling.

So here I go (again). Hello.