It's all in the planning!

My old blog, It’s All In the Planning, is gone forever. I let it lapse on the 19th of last month. For years, I had toyed with shutting it down, yet each time the renewal reminder arrived, I gave in and paid the fee out of habit and sentiment. But there comes a point when even old projects deserve their rest.

It’s All In the Planning was my second attempt at blogging. The real beginning was with ssquah.wordpress.com, which I started in 2007 when The Star temporarily ended my chess column in February that year. That initial WordPress blog, suggested to me by a co-worker at JonStreet.com when I voiced my frustration to him, was my way of filling the sudden void. I needed a release for my creative energy and found it in the blog. My first personal digital space for self expression. Unfortunately, WordPress in its infinite wisdom decided one day that I had violated something or other, and suspended it without warning.

Frustrated but unwilling to stop, I moved on to a local hosting provider and set up It’s All In the Planning. I even reproduced most of my earlier writings there so little was lost. That’s the blog that lasted the longest, consisting of more than a thousand stories and presumably reaching almost a million words, and in a sense became my enduring online home.

When I finally ignored the automated emails asking me to renew the domain, letting it slip away on the 19th of July, it felt like closing the door on a chapter that ran for well over a decade. But then, traffic had dwindled to almost nothing, and I hadn’t written anything new there for years. The site had become a shadow of its former self, and the 1,534 stories had become old and dated, with some made irrelevant by changing circumstances. Nevertheless, I took to archiving them all, so there was no risk of losing my output. What remained was only a domain name and my own stubborn attachment to the past.

Now, anyone visiting the site would be greeted only by the finality of an error page: a simple punctuation mark at the end of a long sentence. An end to one of my efforts. Impermanence to the core.

Anyhow, my writing has never really stopped, has it? It's only the ground that shifted. What I once poured into It’s All In the Planning has long since found continuity here on this present blog, Anything Goes, which I'm sure will remain visible as long as Google exists. The voice there is the same as the voice here, only tempered by time and filled with more reflection as I grow older. Those first two blogs may be gone, but the act of writing carries on. One chapter closes, another continues.