Reading a day at a time

The machinery that publishes this website has been through several changes, and at each stage I have done my best to convert old items into a format that the new machine can deal with. It is slow going, though, and hard to keep motivated. After a burst of energy starting at the beginning and moving forward (I got to mid-2005, roughly), things flagged and I took a new approach: I would scan the website logs and see what people were looking for that they could not find. That way, I said to myself, I am at least giving readers something of value. But that adds another step and is also slow going. So I was delighted to read Peter Rukavina’s recent blog post I read 22 years of blog posts. It took a year.

Peter set out to revisit 22 years of his life. Along the way he “used the opportunity to do a little bit of maintenance”, such as relocating stranded photos, videos and sounds. I need maintenance more than a mirror of my life, but Peter’s approach does suggest a potentially better way. I could set out each day to ensure that I update any post made on that day. Along the way I would revisit the past 18 years of my life, which might be a bonus. And in a year, I won’t have any gnawing doubts.

I know that there are roughly 1000 posts I need to update, and in the past I’ve decided that some simply aren’t worth it. That’s likely to continue to be true. Thanks to the file naming scheme it is a doddle to find all the files written on a particular day. There are five today. I guess I may as well make a start.