My website is a junk drawer full of weird and random things. A wild mind has been living there for a good long while. I used to blog a lot, but when I started doing a newsletter 10 years ago, I slowly, slowly adjusted myself to writing personally about once a week. I continued to blog about projects and work stuff. Blogs written all over the web. I make sure that no matter where something is posted first, if I wrote it, or collaborated on it, it ends up on my website. And so my website is a mishmash of wild and wonderful things.
I’m going to write a blog post about this junk drawer and the things I find inside of it. Perhaps I will pull out some happiness, some silliness, some sadness and a little bit of incredulity. I will write about blogging as an extension of self, a way to see what you’ve learned, who you were and who you have become.
Link to the blog: https://www.laurahilliger.com/blog/
Link to the full post: https://www.laurahilliger.com/writing/my-website-is-a-junk-drawer/
Session Resources:
Comments Archive
reclaimhosting: Welcome to the Chat
maren: And we're into the next hour of the blog-a-thon!
maren: Here is also the direct link to Laura's post https://www.laurahilliger.com/writing/my-website-is-a-junk-drawer/
Andy Rush: Yay, more cat GIFs!
Todd: "And so my website is a mishmash of wild and wonderful things" Yay for mishmashes of wild and wonderful things!
Todd: "I slowly, slowly adjusted myself to writing personally about once a week." Yes, I am slowly, slowly getting exactly one post a month out.
pete rorabaugh: would love to alternate tag this with one of my fav children's book lines: "let the wild rumpus START"
Todd: Yay for "some happiness, some silliness, some sadness and a little bit of incredulity."
pete rorabaugh: @laura thanks for introducing me to "POSSE. It means Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere"
Todd: "And it’s wonderful to rummage through other people’s junk drawers" Laura, here is my drawer: https://thewholeclassroom.com/ I just posted about fish in a blender :)
HibbittsDesign: Digging this embedded chat next to a blog post...
Sarah: This is gonna make a great TDC - show us yer junk drawer!
pete rorabaugh: @todd i DEF remember watching the "bass-o-matic" skit over and over on my snl VHS tapes in high school.
Todd: I am compared lots of university courses to sock drawers which can have a similar vibe. I will remember to add that within the mess of stuff is a buried gem, somewhere :)
Todd: Here is sock drawer rant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZlI94ic9P8
Todd: @pete Loved those nights.
Mark: "The Tao of the junk drawer." A new religion is born!
pete rorabaugh: these discussions of the junk drawer and the sock drawer are giving me a lot of reflection .. i have banished the idea of a junk drawer from my house (too much chaos) .. but ..
pete rorabaugh: .. i think the extension of that is, because i avoid mess sometimes, it keeps me from writing/posting/accumulating things in my blog in the way that laura describes .. id like to challenge that in me.
Todd: I recall Howard Rheingold's little tour of his office. Can't find that one, but these are so insightful to people https://youtu.be/qK5QSH1jmiE?si=PWDiBs6g4MjLgR6v
pete rorabaugh: @todd i think about howard and what i learned from working with him briefly and his books, at least once a week
Jim Groom: Laura literally iventories the junk drawer in my foyer
Andy Rush: POSSE all the things. Even junk drawers.
Todd: @pete Wow. Very cool. This was my attempt at an office tour that was inspired by the one he did. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1X1CCTWVg0
Jim Groom: What a great little post Laura weaved with that metaphor, I not only relate, but I also think I have a promotional laser pointer somewhere in my blog.
LMC: One of the best things about junk drawers, and junk blogs, is that you often find useful or interesting things that you'd forgotten you'd put in there.
Andy Rush: My cats love laser pointers!
pete rorabaugh: @todd watching .. all the pothos plants make me real happy.
pete rorabaugh: @todd .. that was fun, thank you for sharing.
maren: 100% relate to that, @LMC - I always find unexpected things on my blog years later
Todd: @pete. I think plants are important. Someday I'll get rich with this one :) https://thewholeclassroom.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Slide12.jpeg
Alexis Block: @LMC seconding that, and in the spirit of resurfacing junk, I am linking my name to an old static portfolio created for a web dev class at CU. Links are broken, info is old, maiden name is used...
Alexis Block: But finding so many fun projects I completely forgot about!
Alexis Block: Maybe in a future blog I can find some way to bring old projects back to the surface :)
Pilot: This is a lovely post and shares a mindset that I struggle with a lot -- I definitely feel a pressure to keep my web presence very carefully curated, no junk drawer allowed. Thank you!
pete rorabaugh: in the spirit of seeing the junk drawer w new eyes, i started blogging when i started going thru a divorce in 2007 .. the reflections on that wp.com space (diff from my current space) are profound now
taylorjadin: Yeah this is a delightful little post. I very much embrace the junk drawer approach to my web presence, but I've been over the years making sure it centralizes on to my blog that way I can control it.
taylorjadin: That works for me, because I really feel like having a concept of organized and unorganized spaces is important in general. I think most folks NEED a junk drawer as a "pressure release valve" from
taylorjadin: everything else you need to keep organized. You just hope your junk drawer doesn't become a junk room, or junk house!
CogDog: But again, my kitchen junk drawer does not have a search feature, or metadata for each pencil and screwdriver that indicates when it was tossed into the drawer.
CogDog: A practice of blogging I find incredibly valuable, even with a messy set of categories and tags, is that it becomes what I call a "Timelined Self" https://cogdogblog.com/2024/01/the-web-timelined-self
CogDog: In WordPress I can easily find through the URL structure what I was doing in 2019 https://cogdogblog.com/2019/ or in July of 2019 or April of 2019 https://cogdogblog.com/2019/4/
CogDog: or April 2019 https://cogdogblog.com/2019/4/20
CogDog: Likewise, my ~20 years of posting on flickr gives me a means to find all the times I was in Fredericksburg or what I was doing on any given date
CogDog: I relish in the messiness. More often than not I find things I forgot. I forget more than I remember. My blog does not.
taylorjadin: True. search makes all the difference
Imagine if I could search for things in my house like I can on my blog, that would be amazing
I put a lot more wait on time as metadata and the search feature, than I do categories/tags, personally. I've never been good at tagging things.
pete rorabaugh: @alan!!!!
LMC: @CogDog I just went looking at random years on my blog and found all kinds of interesting things! Please enjoy this crow https://lornamcampbell.org/pictures/crow/
Bryan Mathers: Cat + Metaphor = picture...
taylorjadin: I feel like someone MUST link to Bryan Mathers's follow-up post!
https://bryanmmathers.com/my-website-is-a-junk-drawer/
https://bryanmmathers.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/my-website-is-a-junk-drawer.png
taylorjadin: https://bryanmmathers.com/my-website-is-a-junk-drawer/
taylorjadin: https://bryanmmathers.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/my-website-is-a-junk-drawer.png
Stephen Downes: These sidebar chat windows are so 1990 :)
Laura: i absolutely adored reading through this chat a week late
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