I can't bear to throw things away

I'm a pack rat, especially with clippings. I often read an article in the newspaper or in a magazine that strikes me as particularly well-written, or inspiring or otherwise useful, or that seems like something I will want to reread in the future or that I will want to have around to jog my memory. So I rip out the article or the story or the advertisement, and I throw it on a paper pile. The piles keep on growing, and the newspaper clippings turn yellow, and the piles become hideously ugly and intimidating and I rarely look through them -- and my carefully hoarded articles become almost as lost to me as if I had thrown them away in the first place.

The clutter experts would say to just throw everything away. I can't bear to do that. But it occurred to me earlier today, while I was forcing myself to go through the piles looking for something, anything, that I might be able to weed out, that since many of the clippings are of articles that are now on the internet, maybe I could turn the paper clutter into blog clutter. I could find the links, store them here, on blogspot, and then I could throw the original paper copies away. I would still be left with semi-random clutter, but at least it wouldn't be yellowing and musty-smelling! And it would be a lot more compact. The only downside I see is that I would lose some of the illustrations which sometimes accompany print articles but not their electronic counterparts.