Journal vs Blog

For the die hard railfan, what I have to say may seem like heresy. There is more to my life than just trains. Many years ago, I began journaling and have been doing that since I left High School, more than 45 years ago. I was living in Williamsburg, Virginia and was working for the foundation as an interpreter. Much that is know about 18th century Williamsburg came from private journals, written by eye witness. I started mine, but time left the original in he dust as I kept forgetting to write. I started again a few years later, as I was looking forward to a trip to the Holy Lands. I remember Twain's wonderful work Innocence Abroad about the events of his trip to the Holy Lands. I wanted to describe mine and the wonderful characters involved. I spent most of the trip, picture taking and have some pictures showing certain characters take tours, such as the lady who has her picture in front of everything. That journal went by the wayside.

I than began a new journal when I became a preacher. Still, there are many gaps found in the present day journal, but I have been more loyal to it over the past 25 years. About 5 years ago, I began this blog to record my travels and show some pictures. I thought the title was a play on the old concept of travelogue, now being a Travel Blog. I use to even blog the day trips oriented to train watching, only. But changed that to only real trips with train watching as a part. I was videoing trains and putting my video on YouTube.

So, I blog and journal, at the same time. I was looking back and realized that there was very little overlap between journal and blog. So I started inserting the blog into the journal. The blog is less personal but do have a few areas when I gave thoughts on things, so it would be a good entry into my journal. My first entries were strange. I took the appropriate blog entries, in the blog composition area you can work by composing, with no codes, or code by HTML. I went through the blog and took the HTML codes and made a long webpage. I use Google Chrome which allows, in the printing function, to save he sheet to PDF. I numbers it as a volume in the journal.

For some, I copied the webpage and pasted into the Google Doc, page. Even the pics carried over. That was used in newer insert. So now I am using both the blog and the journal, interchangeable. I may not use all the pics into my journal, will use he text. Blog equals public journal, Journal is private. I might insert blog into journal as well as creating blog entries for blog only. Of course journal is for journal only, usually. If it is blog worthy, it will be started in blog before determining it to be journal worthy.