Honestly, much as it pains me that I’ve wasted my whole morning working on this, I think I’m going to give up converting my very old blog to a static archive site and just delete the damn thing. My main reasons:
- A lot of this material is stuff that, to be honest, I don’t mind vanishing off the face of the internet.
- Even if I did mind, it turns out the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has done an excellent job archiving material.
- Originally I wanted to keep it around to prevent link rot , but considering I already changed the subdomain and didn’t set up redirects years ago I think that’s a long-lost cause 😂
- For those few posts that are on worthwhile, evergreen topics, I can always write about those again here. I can even reuse parts of the original posts, I guess; it’s not like old-me is going to take current-me to task over plagiarism!
I do have some mixed feelings, I guess. The ephemerality of much of the web makes me uncomfortable sometimes, particularly the loss of my own content, even though I find some of what my younger self said kinda cringey 😂 (Who doesn’t?) But at the same time, I can’t keep stuff online in an unmaintained blog running on abandonware that I’d guess broke on the release of PHP7. For real longevity, static websites seem like the way to go… closely followed by paying a host to maintain your platform for you (which is what I’m doing here on Micro.blog, after all!) and trusting them not to go out of business, haha. Here’s hoping to not have a repeat of this morning’s headache any time soon!
