This blog is five years old.

Five years.

That’s more than 28% of my life.

I’ve covered this topic so much, I’m really at a loss about what to say here. I guess I’m just impressed I’ve stuck to something this long, something that while fun and a neat distraction, was also a fair bit of work. The designs always require a lot of refining and testing, even though I’ve only made them for the past three versions. And there have been at least a dozen times I’ve had to force myself to make a new entry when I didn’t want to, because I knew it would help me later.

And this blog has helped me. It’s given me such a great window into my past, it’s helped me learn from it and improve myself. It’s helped me be more reflective, and it’s also improved my writing by leaps and bounds. It’s helped me connect with people of similar interests, and it’s given me hope that my thoughts aren’t standing alone.

This blog is not perfect. While this entire five year journey has been about improving it and myself, and even though I think the current version presents the most ideal way to view my posts, there are still things that need improving. On the design side, I don’t like how the comment form looks, for instance. And I want all tags to be shown on the Archive page. On the content side, this blog does tend to focus on me a lot. While that’s the entire point, I still think I could improve it to be a mixture of stuff about me, and stuff about what I (and readers) are interested in.

So in pursuit of that I will finally be splitting up this blog within a month. When you first go to andrewrabon.com, you’ll be presented with two options: “Full Blog” and “Public Blog,” with descriptions for both. Anyone can access the public blog and thus any articles I’ve made public (which amount to one at the moment.) To access the full blog you’ll need to copy and paste a code/phrase that’ll be on my Facebook profile in the “Write something about yourself” box. The full blog has both private entries (such as this one) and public articles.

It’s taken me a while to come up with this system. Even though I’ve been toying with the idea of leaving Facebook, when it comes down to it, it has almost all my friends. And these friends are the only ones that I want to see the private entries. I made my profile private a while ago, so the only way to get the code/phrase is to be my pre-approved friend. I think the system could work, at least for as long as I’m on Facebook. And really, I probably will be for at least a few more years. Worst comes to worst, I’ll just take down most of my info from it and rarely log in.

Five years ago, I didn’t need such a system. Or rather, I didn’t think I needed it. When you’re 13, you have this attitude of “accept who I am or else.” Most of the time, you even go out of your way to push people’s buttons so if they reject you, you can say they’re not accepting of who you are. But I’ve grown up since then, (it’d be impossible not to.) I’m the same core person but a lot of my personal “policies” have changed. Now, instead of pushing myself on others to prove a point, I want to collaborate with them. Communicate with them. Be equals with them.

That’s the reason this blog needs this split now. Or rather, that’s why it’s being implemented now. Perhaps this blog has always needed it, but I just didn’t care about the consequences without it.

Five years. I remember how excited I was when I did the first one of these. I remember reflecting on how much I’d changed in that one year. Five years later, there isn’t even a comparison.

But as I said, I’m still the same core person. And this is the same core blog, despite the changes to both of us.
-Andrew