My very first blog post dates from January 7, 2003, and it’s exactly one sentence long: “Web statistics configured and made available.” Not exactly a headline, but it was the start of eighteen years of blogging. And ever since I moved my site to Obsidian and Quartz, those eighteen years were nowhere to be found online.
Today I fixed that, with help from Claude. All the old posts are back on the site, and you can browse them in the archive. Fair warning: they’re all in Dutch.
What got rescued from the bit bucket
- 659 blog posts from 2003 through 2021. The busiest year was 2007, with 106 posts.
- 830 comments on 169 posts, from friends, family and the occasional stranger.
- Around 950 photos and videos, now back with the right post.
This blog has had quite a life: it started as a homegrown site, then moved to Joomla, WordPress, Hugo, and now Quartz. Every move left some marks behind, and all of them had to be straightened out.
What we fixed
Dates. Depending on which era they came from, the posts used three different date formats. They’re all consistent now, in Dutch local time.
Images. Back in the WordPress days I’d post a small thumbnail that linked to the full-size image. Now the post simply shows the full-size version. Photos from my old photo album script (photo.php, anyone remember those?) were tracked down in the folders behind it.
Hugo codes. YouTube clips, photo galleries, videos and links to earlier posts were special codes in Hugo. They’ve all been converted, and every link between posts works again.
Comments. The old comments sit under each post in a collapsible “Reacties van toen” (“Comments from back then”) block. I stripped out the commenters’ email addresses, because those don’t belong on a public site.
Archive. Every year has its own overview page, for example Archief 2010.
And while we were at it: the previous/next buttons under posts and the recent posts list weren’t working at all. The cause was a single capital letter: the code looked for posts/, but the folder is called Posts/. On top of that, the “next” button kept skipping a post. Both are fixed, so you can now page back from this post all the way to 2003.
What couldn’t be saved
About 100 images and videos are gone for good. They lived on services that no longer exist, like Posterous and Xfire, or in a folder from my Joomla site that I no longer have. I deliberately left them in as text: 🖼️ Afbeelding niet meer beschikbaar (image no longer available). That way you can see something is missing, instead of it quietly disappearing.
Eight external images turned out to still be online, including two xkcd comics. They now live on my own server, so they won’t disappear after all.
A few to start with
- 2006-05-19 Server dood (“Server dead”), with photos of burnt-out capacitors
- 2010-09-21 Morgen trouwen (“Getting married tomorrow”), the day before our wedding, with the comments from back then
- Nieuwe site! En welkom terug aan mezelf (“New site! And welcome back to myself”), the last time I announced “I’m back”
- 2017-01-06 Een zoontje - de eerste 9 maanden review (“A son - the first 9 months review”), a review of having my son for 9 months
It feels a bit like opening an old shoebox full of photos. Lots of memories, a few embarrassing opinions, and a whole lot of posts about servers.