I made a reference to my blog undergoing botox treatments yesterday which was more than a bit intentional as I have indeed restored some youthful vigour to this blog.
After starting my first blog on the Blogware platform at blog.jason.hammond.net back in 2006 when I was in library school, I ended up with two blogs after switching over to WordPress and the domain, www.headtale.com.
My old blog was carrying on fine (and at no cost to me) so I left well enough alone until one day, I realised that it had disappeared without warning (well, my host said they’d sent advance notice but I’d either not seen them or ignored them, thinking that my blog was safe having been told by that same host they would never cut off support, not realising it was the underlying Blogware system that was ending.)
Anyhow, I was able to salvage my old blog and get it imported to a (slightly) new host at jason.hammond.net (lots of confusion there as that’s also a domain I used to own which I used for things like a popular Fred Eaglesmith tab page and a few other odds & ends – some old photos, a few essays, stuff like that. That meant I was paying for two hosts which finally inspired me to do something I’d long planned to do and seek out someone to merge these two blogs into one.
I thought about doing it myself – there’s lots of info about how to go about this online – but I thought it best to hire someone to make sure it was done right (as much as possible) rather than trying myself as, even with proper backups, I was afraid I’d fuck something up beyond redemption.
I posted it on MetaFilter’s job board (hoping to guarantee someone a bit more reliable and personally connected via that tight, small community) than trusting what essentially would be access to a wide variety of info about myself including my blog passwords and even my credit card info to some absolute complete stranger.
After a couple false starts with early respondents who seemed promising (including one designer in the Maritimes) but who backed out once they realised the scope of the project and another who was a little too insistent and didn’t have a portfolio to share, I ended up being contacted by someone at Code18 Web Design in Atlanta, Georgia.
We exchanged info, settled on a price and he had it done within about, oh, 48 hours, even fixing a few other glitchy things that had accumulated on this blog over the years as I added and deleted various plug-ins.
So that’s all a long way of saying that I finally have all 2400 or so blog posts I’ve done since 2006 (average 400/year!) in a single place. For the most part, everything seems to have imported well (formatting on some early posts is a bit off, there are possibly some missing images in early posts, internal links might not all be operational, I now have 3x the number of categories I did before) and who knows if I’ll ever get everything perfect. But again, as a record of my life, recent development in technology and libraries and politics, it’s nice to have.
Feel free to look around but again, the further back you go, the more chance you’ll find broken links (external and internal), missing images and posts with weird formatting. But otherwise, yay!
