Bear with me… there’s a reason why I’m telling you this trivia.
Until 2001, I had a website that partly advertised some of my musical/transcribing exploits and partly worked as the general “mY BRilliaNT hOMEpage” that was the ultimate aspiration for all non-professional web users in those days (although I’m relieved to say that I never had a colourful border and I never used the <blink> tag).
It was in 2001 that I got all excited by the newfangled “weblog” idea and decided to have more of a journal-type layout on my site. The first year or so, I had to update the posts manually, writing a new page in HTML for every post (I think blog management systems such as Blogger were around, but I wanted something self-hosted, and couldn’t make sense of any of the self-hosted options). I then moved to Grey Matter, which was nice and simple, and stood me in good stead for about 4 years.
By the time I outgrew Grey Matter, WordPress had become the impressive, approachable and flexible tool it is today, and it was liberating to make the jump. However, I never quite managed to get WordPress to automiraculously import my archived Grey Matter posts, so I put them on my desktop, intending to gradually import them manually.
And then I did a bit of tidying up. Maybe there was an OS update in there somewhere. Maybe I even made a backup, and then deleted it when I’d restored the most obvious stuff. Anyhow, the whole bloody lot got trashed.
Fortunately, the Internet Wayback Machine, part of archive.org, is a pretty amazing tool. I can pretty much access the entire history of my blog, and although it’s a tiny bit more fiddly than having the raw text files on my desktop, it gets the job done.
So… I’m gradually working through all the pre-May-2006 posts, entering them manually into WordPress, so I’ll have the whole lot in one reasonably future-proof format. Why am I doing this, considering neither of you are likely to browse through ancient posts about Euro 2004 or the launch of Flickr pro accounts? Well, maybe it’s a case of late-developing OCD, or maybe I just like having access to some sort of history of my life, even though it’s in the selective and intermittent form of a blog. And if it entertains anyone else, why not?
[EDIT: If I do have late-developing OCD, it's going to be really tested by the fact I've shifted the whole blog from spaghetti-factory.co.uk to blog.sfocata.co.uk and will therefore have to fix all the sodding photo links!]