Past Daily: State Of The Website – New Years Day 2019
A new year and the end to a frustrating and exhausting old one. Past Daily heads into our 7th trip around the sun, with no conceivable end in sight and with a lot of plans on the horizon.
It’s been a strange year, as I suspect it has for most everyone. The world has become an odd place – and there seems no letup in sight.
The reason I started Past Daily in the first place was to create a website that showed historic comparisons to events going on today – how something that happened in the 1950s could have a lasting affect well into the new century.
But that’s been harder and harder to do of late – simply because there is almost nothing currently going on in our society and the world in general that we can compare to years, or decades earlier. It’s as if we’re in completely new territory here and drawing any comparison is almost pointless.
But I suppose the one thing you can come away with, in drawing comparisons to events happening in 2018 to events happening in say, 1973 is that we’re a resilient culture – no matter what happens, we always seem to bounce back. Maybe a little shop worn, thread-bare and beat-up, but we’re still standing.
You’ll notice there hasn’t been a Past Daily Fundraiser this year – not that we don’t need your support through contributions, it’s just that there have been so many tragedies unfolding this year for everyone, that asking for money to keep a website going seems a little absurd.
That said – I am grateful to all of you who have written in, responded to posts, had requests or just wanted to say hi and thanks. Maintaining a website like Past Daily takes a lot of time and energy, and there have been many times I have felt like the proverbial tree falling in a forest with no one around to notice.
I also want to give a big shout out and expression of eternal gratitude to those readers who have corrected my spelling or reminded me of wrong dates or set records straight. Writing posts for 14 hours a day can lead to a lot of mistakes just from sheer exhaustion, and I have found myself on more than one occasion getting a post together at 1 or 2 in the morning, somewhat bleary-eyed and incoherent, writing a sentence which makes absolutely no sense. And it’s the sharp-eyed among you who are saving my illiterate ass on more than one occasion. So I am beyond grateful for your help. And please, keep it up.
So we’re starting 2019 off on a somewhat optimistic note, in contrast to 2018 which proved to be a gigantic “Meh” for more than the usual reasons. One thing you can do though, if you don’t feel like pledging a few bucks via Patreon or PayPal, is to click on an ad or two in the posts – ads help keep us alive, and I know they’re a pain in the ass, but they are a necessary evil if you’re going to try and survive, and so far, ads aren’t doing that. But the more traffic we get means the more people see those ads, and the more people who see those ads means the more money I get from those ads. There’s a method to the madness.
But I want to let you know that Past Daily will continue to give you all the best from my archive and we’ll continue doing it every day, seven days a week. Because history is important and ignorance of your culture is really-honestly-absolutely uncool.
Here’s to the New Year!
Stay sane and stick around – don’t forget to go exploring – hopefully we’ll be hitting 8,000 posts this year and I’m sure you haven’t seen a lot of them. Take wild advantage of the Search Engine, you never know what you’ll find.
Fingers crossed and on to the future,
Gordon Skene – Past Daily.
