Several months ago I got the itch to start posting here again. It has been many years since I had anything resembling a personal blog. Blogging is different than social media, it takes more effort to maintain. And like exercise or a hobby, if you don't keep at it it can be easy to let go.
In restarting things, I wanted to resurrect my previous blog posts. The problem was, I didn't take care in archiving things in a meaningful way. It's sad to say, I just never took care in keeping my own content. Much of what I'd written in the past was tied to the platform I was using. Being a stereotypical web developer, I changed platforms several times over the years. I just never had the mindset to keep copies of much of it. Shame on me.
What I can glean from memory and from the archives I pull down, I used Movable Type, Tumblr, TextPattern, ExpressionEngine, and currently Statamic. There may be others in there for short periods, bit those were the ones that lasted the longest.
Thankfully, quite a bit of what I wrote ended up being available via the Wayback Machine. I spent several evenings going through the Wayback Machine and downloading copies of my site. That is just one part of the process of course. The rest is converting those web archives to posts here in Statamic.
It's not been an easy process. There's a large gap of 10 years still there as I work through these.
I hope that this is a fruitful endeavor. I don't look at this as a way to increase my visibility on the web anymore; that's certainly why I was writing for periods of my web-life. I'm now of a mind to just ensure that my thoughts remain online. It would be nice to think that future Sims generations could look back over what I've written and get some idea of who I was. Who knows if these posts will carry on that far ahead, but I now feel some motivation to make sure they can.