My website is a junk drawer

We all have a drawer somewhere in our house or our flat, behind the counter in the office or, not as a drawer but a shoebox, a container, let’s just call it a drawer – we all have the junk drawer. It’s the place you put stray rubber bands and the promotional laser pointer from the accountant down the street. Maybe there are ribbons or address stickers, glasses cleaner, a single cough drop, highlighters, an old USB drive or spare headphone ear cover thingies in there. There’s a good chance that there is something highly useful, like a roll of tape or new post-it notes in the junk drawer, but we still call it “the junk drawer” because useful or not, it is still a lot of junk. It is the place in our home where we put all the superfluous items. It is exactly the right place for these items to live because you know that if you are looking for something that is rarely necessary, it lives in the junk drawer.

My website is a junk drawer. It is the place I put all the random digital things. Unlike a physical junk drawer, I put all the useful things in there too. A multiple decade long storage facility that holds mainly texts, but also decks and images, audio and videos.

When I think about archival in the real world, I don’t think about the junk drawer. But in the digital world, the junk drawer, my website, is where it all goes. Years ago, and still today on the indie web, people used the acronym POSSE. It means Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I was never great at keeping the junk drawer that is my website organised, and I certainly haven’t published everything to my own site first.

But who on Earth has an organised junk drawer? About once every five years I try to organise my drawer, but within weeks whatever scheme I’ve organised with is faded into disorder. It is simple the Tao of the junk drawer. Isn’t the wild organisation in our homes, brains and personal online portals what make life interesting? It’s wonderful to find the unexpected in my junk drawer. Fascinating to find things that I placed there long ago and forgot about.

And it’s wonderful to rummage through other people’s junk drawers (the digital ones, it’d be weird if I showed up at your house and started rummaging around in your drawers).

The web has these places still. The wild and free and full of random exists on the Web still. It’s nice to have a community of people who care about these places.

#ReclaimOpen because you all surely have weird, wonderful and inspiring stuff in your junk drawers and that is the most interesting drawer in the house.