Ever since I kicked off the work on BlogMore I've had a renewed interest in writing on this blog (as you can probably tell from the stats and the calendar). But not just writing: also tweaking it, tidying it up, thinking about maintaining it into the future, thinking about the links and the categories and so on.

In doing so, I've also been looking at other folk who persist in keeping a blog, and especially those who maintain blogs built with static site generation tools, and in some cases I'm mildly envious of how far back some of them stretch.

When it comes to the world of blogging I was kind of late to the party. The first version was just a section of my self-developed website, hosted on www.davep.org. Don't go looking there for it now, it was long ago removed. In fact my personal website is mostly just a placeholder for what once was. The Wayback Machine still has a copy though, so I can see that the first blog post I wrote for my site was dated 2003-03-31.

My first blog post

I maintained this for a while, the engine for it all being some self-written PHP engine that was what could be best described as a dynamic static site (in other words it generated everything on request from underlying text files and HTML snippets because I had no wish to be faffing around with databases on a web host). Eventually though the blog side of this got to be too much trouble and I jumped over to Blogger.

I maintained that blog for quite a few years, with the first post being made in 2006 and the last in 2011. Sadly it's all quite broken now. I used to include a lot of images and, while some of them are embedded in the site itself, most were hosted on the older version of my website, as part of the photo gallery I also had there.

This all fell apart when I finally killed off the PHP version of my site and all the images were removed. Now the blog is a wasteland of broken image icons (not to mention a wasteland of broken external links -- so many of the sites I referred to back then have fallen off the net).

I hate this. I hate that thirty-something me was fired up enough to want to write stuff down and communicate to other people (and to future me) and it's all decayed. I especially dislike that the original version of my blog, now only stored on the Wayback Machine (and perhaps on a hard drive that I think is in a box somewhere in storage, perhaps also on some burnt-as-a-backup DVDs) is otherwise inaccessible. Much like I did with my original photoblog, I want to rescue this. I want to rescue all of this.

The technical challenges of teasing out the original posts from the Internet Archive and from Blogger aren't too great. Turning a bunch of HTML into Markdown isn't impossible either -- the library that I use in OldNews should do the job fine there. All that sort of work feels like a fun little challenge that will keep me amused for a few evenings.

There are two main things that cause me to pause when thinking about doing this.

The first is that some of those very old posts, as I mentioned above, link to places that don't exist and haven't existed for a long time. It raises the question: do I even care to preserve things that have no context any more?

The second is that many of the posts in the Blogger blog, as I mention, relied on images hosted on my old site. Right now I'm not actually sure where those photos are! While I took a backup of all the code and other data for www.davep.org when I did the big reboot (storing it all up on GitHub), I seem to have stripped out all of the photos. This makes sense as there was a lot of data there. Making sure I had a backup of those files feels like something I would do -- I hang on to all sorts of data -- but at the moment I can't locate them1.

To make this work, for this to stand any chance of working, I need to pull them all back out from somewhere.

Will I do this? I don't know yet. The seed is there, the itch is waiting to be scratched. I look at the age span of this blog, and the calendar page, and think it could be really cool to really back-fill it from my older blogs. The graph might end up looking really funky.

On the other hand: am I just trying to preserve irrelevant things as a way to make work for myself (albeit "work" that is fun; after all coding is a hobby as well as a living).

On the gripping hand: if I can get the images back, a wasteland of links to sites that don't exist any more does, at the very least, provide a history of what was and is no longer.

  1. I should point out that I have the original photos all backed up any number of ways and in multiple locations, but it's the specific jpeg files with their specific names as appeared in the photo library on my site that I need to make this work. ↩