Oh this is going to be painful…

This week I finalised the Reading Journal Notebook that I created and ordered a printed proof from Amazon to arrive before I publish it. It’s known as a ‘low content’ book in that there’s not much text in it. This is a surprise for me as I usually write SO MUCH.

After I ordered it, I decided on another project.

I have 1498 published blog posts on this website that captured my entire professional history since 2011. Given that I “worked out loud” through my professional career, I have captured an insane amount of information.

I spent a few hours trying to find WordPress Plugins that would extract blog posts for me automatically and tried a couple. However, they extract them into .XML files and I couldn’t figure out a way to be able to put them into a Word document (well, actually, I use Pages now keeping everything under the Apple ecosphere).

I tried:

• IntoRealPages (simply too expensive for me based on the number of blog posts)
• Export Media With Selected Content WordPress Plugin (this one was good as I now have a backup of the posts separately as an .XML files)
• Print My Blog Pro – this seemed like a good one but there were some minor limitations that meant it didn’t work for me.

In the end, I decided to do it manually and spend a couple of hours every day slowly doing this over time. I’m copying and pasting the entire blog post into a Pages document and then editing each post with relevant Headers and other editing functions.

So far I have completed all of 2011, 2012 and halfway through 2013. It’s slow going but it’s been interesting to read what I used to do, how I did it, and all the issues I had in the past.

What is most interesting is capturing the difficulties I had over influencing organisations to consider social learning and performance consulting in organisations. I wonder if they are of any concern anymore or if the conversations have moved on to completely different subjects?

Another thing I am noticing is just how much I have written over the years – both online through this blog (and also a personal blog called Ramblings – which will be the next task to put that into a book too because it captures my life from 2006 – 2011) but one step at a time.

Add to that the TONS of Facebook and Twitter posts; over 500 videos (of my daily vlogging which are now made private in YouTube) plus another 250+ videos on Book Reviews on YouTube and included over 27 volumes of hand written journals that span my life since 1984, I can say – quite truthfully – that I have built up and created a massive volume of work and words in the course of my life.

I had to shake my head in disbelief.

I have bits of myself EVERYWHERE – all over the world, online, in social media, in video platforms, in journals, in presentations, in podcasts, in photos….. it’s MIND BOGGLING.

I cannot erase myself – I have definitely “written myself into existence”.

So in times when I’m hard on myself, or bemoan that “I really haven’t done anything in my life, really” – I can knock some sense into me and say, “YES, YES YOU HAVE! You have been a CREATING MACHINE – and don’t ever forget it!!”

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