In moving my blog to WordPress, I’ve accidentally created a little side-job (or mild obsession?) for myself: cleaning up old blog entries. I have over 1500 entries in this blog, so I can keep myself (pointlessly) busy for quite some time, just combing through old entries and cleaning them up a bit.
First, I have a lot of old entries that don’t have any categories assigned. This bothers me for some reason. So I’m going through those, a few at a time, and categorizing them. And the really old entries don’t have titles, because Blogger didn’t initially support post titles. So I’m adding titles to some of those. And I’m cleaning up random embeds, YouTube links, and the like.
Once thing I’m noticing is how many of the links on older posts are dead now. In particular, music-related links seem to be the most ephemeral. Links to old band websites are often dead, the bands in question apparently disbanded, the members having moved on to other bands, or living quiet lives with nine-to-five jobs, or whatever people do when their bands dissolve.
Many old domains are now in the hands of some fairly iffy companies that hoard domain names, and just put up ads on them, and/or offer to sell them for exorbitant prices. My brother Patrick’s old domain, for instance, can be bought for just $1995. Geez.
There are some really odd changes too. An old domain that used to be associated with The Pixies is now being used for a blog related to DIY home repair. I’m not sure if it’s a real blog, or a test site, or part of a scam, or what. Weird though.
I’ve found myself using the Wayback Machine site to look up some older stuff. Not everything can be found with that, but a lot of stuff can.
I’m also finding myself a little dismayed about how my brother Pat’s footprint is disappearing from the internet. I just went ahead and saved to PDF a couple of pages honoring him, just in case they disappear. I’ll probably upload them here, at some point. No point in getting too deeply into this right now, but it’s something that’s been on my mind lately. I know that dwelling too much on the past isn’t healthy, and I’m trying not to do that, but I can’t stop myself from engaging in a certain amount of nostalgia.