Let’s Go To The Old Posts Home
Kev is wondering if you ever read your old posts, while both Terence and Roy are tending the “old post” gardens of their blogs.
Terence:
Sometimes the work is delightful - finding a prescient post from a decade ago. Sometimes it is frustrating - being unable to find a vital-but-long-dead link. And sometimes it is sad - seeing how much or how little the world has changed.
Roy:
I like this gardening metaphor to refer to website maintenance. It is an activity that I also try to indulge in daily - I had previously been referring to it as “OTD cleanup” where “OTD” stands for “On this day”, since I primarily use that function of the site to go through old posts.
(Incidentally, I’d been doing a very similar thing in Apple Photos by each morning searching for that day, and culling anything from that day in previous years that I didn’t need… until the latest software updates in the Apple ecosystem got rid if my ability to run that search, providing still more evidence that no one at Apple actually uses their own products anymore.)
Between my epic blog restoration project and moving the damned thing lock, stock, and barrel from one service to another multiple times over the past several years, I’ve certainly re-read my fair share of old posts. Not to mention that I frequently link old posts because there are a number of ongoing issues of concern or topics to which I return with some frequency. This is one of the reasons I want the site to have internal backlinks.
The matter of weeding old posts, despite being something I do not do, is as good a prompt as any to explain my current approach to various things about old posts during the restoration project.
Despite some earlier inclination to modernize some limited set of old links (e.g. to books), in the end I will not be doing this. My old posts represent the web as it was when I wrote them, and linkrot is a fact of life on the web. As I slowly restore two decades of blogging, there will be an uncountable number of links in old posts that will lead nowhere or to the wrong thing. That’s just the way it goes.
That said, I am doing a limited amount of format conforming for certain types of posts, at least as it concerns posts from 2018 to present, which I consider my current blogging period. Mostly this means that for posts that are just cited blockquotes from other sites, I’ve been going through and getting rid of my different approaches and making them all the same. I’m not yet sure if I’ll do this for posts prior to 2018 because I’ve not yet waded into that material in a significant or sufficient enough way to even remember how or even if I had such posts in the past.
Kev:
Over the years I've written hundreds of posts on this site, and of all that content, I can only remember a small fraction of those posts. That's because they're often something that's on my mind at the time, and I inevitably move on with my life and forget what I wrote. So it's fun to go back now and then.
My memory issues being what they are, I’ve forgotten actual trips I’ve taken, which at least makes good fodder for a blog post. When I set out on the restoration project, I wondered more than once how it might affect my sense of identity, since I generally don’t have a consistent sense of a single self over time.
In this current relocation and restoration of the blog, the old post I’ve thought the most about is the one where I accidentally discovered a new metaphor for being autistic: the need for constructing narrative as a bulwark against the worldly database of existence.
Addenda
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I should note that as I go through old posts for import, I am correcting typos if I, or my Markdown editor, spot them, because they annoy me and I don’t consider them a required sort of “but that’s how it was when I posted the post” sort of thing.
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Also, just encountered in the latest batch of old posts being prepared for import: it was February 8, 2020, when it was first suggested to me that I've aphantasia. (That’ll be a dead link until this batch gets imported.)
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Also: a post where I thought I might’ve coined the phrase “SEO greedwagon” but then found that, alas, I had not.