Last month, I wrote about how I had found peace with myself regarding losing over a decade’s worth of blog posts.
Well, I’ve already sort-of changed my mind. I have already brought back some old posts which, until now, were only accessible on the Web Archive Wayback Machine.
This doesn’t mean that all of my old posts will be reinstated – if anything, I’ll be bringing back 1-2% of them at most. My criteria are:
- Posts which, despite being offline for about 5 years, are still linked to. I’m using the Redirection WordPress plugin to track 404 errors, which you can group by URL to see the most commonly not-found pages.
- Posts that still offer useful advice, or information that is otherwise not easily accessible on other web sites.
- Posts that mark important events in my life.
So, here’s a selection of what I’ve brought back already, in chronological order:
- Media Player Classic (January 2004). A review of a now-defunct lightweight alternative media player for Windows. VLC is probably a better option nowadays.
- Apple Lossless Encoder (May 2004). A blog post about Apple’s then-new music format which preserves full audio quality when ripping CDs in iTunes, and how it compares to other formats like FLAC and Monkey’s Audio.
- Knock-off Nigel (August 2008). An anti-piracy advert for TV.
- How to migrate a Parallels virtual machine to VirtualBox (November 2008). A how-to guide for switching from Parallels Desktop to VirtualBox, which I imagine is still useful for some people.
- Fixing high memory usage caused by mds (February 2013). A how-to guide for fixing an issue with MacOS. I don’t use a Mac anymore but hopefully this is still useful to someone.
- Baby update (November 2015). This was actually a draft version of a post that must have somehow survived in Firefox’s local storage, so I re-published it.
- How to: fix wrong location on iPhone (January 2017). Another how-to guide that fixed an issue I was having at the time with my iPhone’s location randomly jumping around.
There’s more to come, as and when I find time to restore them. I’m also using Google Search Console to find pages that it’s expecting to work, but that result in a 404 error.
