Over the Christmas break, I spent quite a lot of my time off work going through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, to bring back more old posts. I started this in November 2023, after deciding that I would bring back more popular or interesting posts.
I’m not going to link to every single post that I’ve reinstated, because that would take forever. Indeed, so far, I’ve reinstated 445 old blog posts, compared to the 242 new posts that I’ve written since I restarted blogging in 2022 (including this one). My main starting point has been my year in review posts (see 2024 in review as an example) where I have gone through and reinstated most of the blog posts linked from each of these reviews, going back to 2009.
It’s been a big job; I reinstated 78 blog posts from 2014 alone. My focus now is on blog posts from 2008 and earlier, my aim being to have at least one blog post from each month reinstated going back to when I started in 2002.
Reinstating blog posts isn’t a simple copy and paste job. For each one that I’m bringing back, I am:
- Making sure any links still work (and leaving them pointing at the Wayback Machine if they don’t).
- Re-adding images – many of these are just links to Flickr, but some need uploading again.
- Checking spelling and grammar, because I’ve found lots of mistakes that I’d never previously spotted.
- Reinstating any other missing blog posts that are linked, if needed.
- Checking and adding tags – older blog posts especially did not have tags, or only had one or two.
- Any blog posts from before I switched to WordPress in 2011 also need re-formatting.
It’s also worth noting that some blog posts were not individually indexed by the Wayback Machine, and so I have to try to find them in other ways, such as checking older versions of the home page.
My original aim was to reinstate between 1 and 2% of my old blog posts, and at present, I’m on around 1.5%. The quality definitely declines as time goes on; in the early days (mainly before Twitter), many blog posts would be one or two sentences at most but with several posts in a day. I’ll bring some of these back, but there are also good reasons why I won’t be reinstating everything. You can find these in my Finding peace post from October 2023.
If you want to take a look back at my old posts, I’ve reinstated the Archives page, which lists every single blog post split by year. This is generated using the Simple Yearly Archive plugin for WordPress.
