For months, I’ve been needing to shut down my old blog and archive my old posts. And I finally found a solution: blog.sh!
Although the term “blog” was coined in 1997, I didn’t write my first post until 2002. I started blogging defensively. What happened was that I would start drafting an email to one person, then think “Oh, this other person would be interested too” and add them, but then realize that some of what I was writing wasn’t really appropriate for them, so then I would make two emails and have to copy and paste and edit. Finally, I realized I could just put all of the “public” info — the things I didn’t care if anyone read — into a blog post and only send specific emails to particular people.
I had been exploring wikis at the time, using PHPWiki and saw that there was a mechanism to do daily posts using a calendar interface. I used that for a couple of years but then decided to switch to using Drupal for blogging. My blog resided at blog.bierfaristo.com and my first post was on Dec 14, 2005. By this time I was also getting interest from other organizations who wanted to set up websites that were effectively blogs: the Amherst Democratic Town Committee and Esperanto League for North America (now Esperanto-USA) so I set up Drupal websites for them as well.
I was tangentially involved when the University of Massachusetts Amherst decided to standardize on Drupal as their content management system. I had been using it for a few years at that point. They brought in a focus group and had two presentations: one was by a Drupal consultant and the other was for a commercial product that was a static-site generator. I could see the attraction of using the static-site generator. But I knew that the campus would need to accept content via the web and, their only solution for that was to hand-write one-off PHP scripts. That sounded like a disaster from a security standpoint.
One of the short-comings of Drupal was that it was difficult to update: point updates were pretty easy, but each major update required migrating the content and completely retheming the site. And when Drupal 8 came out they basically threw out all of the expertise anyone had developed by completely redesigning the entire system and made managing the dependencies so complex you needed a separate tool (composer). So, I gave up on Drupal and never updated from Drupal 7.
A lot of other people did as well. Some folks created a fork called backdrop that rejected the changes that Drupal 8 had made. I had initially considered switching to that as well, but they had decided not to support the antiquated “blog” system and it required migrating the content into a different content type. So I didn’t bother making the switch.
During this period of time I had also started using Twitter and eventually also set up a separate Twitter feed for my author work. I quit using it and finally deleted my accounts when Twitter started being run by a Nazi. I grabbed archives of my feeds before I did so. But I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them.
When I set up my author blog (where you’re reading this post), I decided to use WordPress. Mainly, as I’ve written elsewhere, this was because I could get my hosting service to manage the install and keep it up-to-date. It works OK, although I’ve been worried about security as AI is being used to find vulnerabilities. But I try to use relatively few modules and make sure they stay updated. So far, I haven’t had any problems. Early on, the security in WordPress was execrable, which was in part why I went with Drupal as a CMS. It seems better now.
In the interim, my old blog site still languished on Drupal 7. I hadn’t used it in several years. Even though Drupal 7 had been end-of-lifed a couple of times, people still kept patching it to keep it working. But finally, they said they really, really, really were going to stop. And, in April, I started getting a daily email whining that it really was EoL and needed to be taken down. So I was interested when I saw the announcement about blog.sh that was optimized for building an archive site.
I was particularly interested in a static site generator for an archive because I wanted something that wouldn’t require maintenance. It wasn’t something I would necessarily watch all the time and so I didn’t want to have to think about managing security. I wanted something that could just sit there.
I used it to set up the blog for Elegant Lich and that worked pretty well. So I decided to create an archive site: archive.bierfaristo.com and begin migrating content into it. I migrated the blog posts first. And I was able to import my twitter feeds.
I still have a few outstanding challenges. I tried to migrate my blog from Esperanto-USA, but that blog has been gone a long time: I tried to grab some posts from the wayback machine but have only been partially successful. I was an early user of Flickr and I still have a lot of images there. Phil and I used an early version of lychee to build image galleries. When they switched to a new new system, the upgrade looked complicated, so I never updated that either and it’s kind of orphaned. I don’t see these as high priorities. But things I can work on if I feel like it.
I have lost some things. I think I failed to grab a backup from the brief time I was at mastodon.lol. I don’t think I’ll bother to grab my history from Facebook. I very rarely wrote anything specifically for Facebook. Early on, you could gateway your posts from Twitter to Facebook, but they killed that after a while. I mostly wrote for my blog and then shared links there. They never got much traction because, of course, Facebook’s whole business model is to hide things you post from your friends unless you pay them.
I’m not expecting anyone to be that interested in my old posts anyway. But I can often remember an old post where I mentioned something or linked to something, and I’ll be interested to look things up, link to things, or share them again when they’re relevant.
The author of blog.sh seemed a little surprised at how quickly I found his system and started using it. I think I saw his original announcement at Mastodon: someone must have boosted it into my feed. I’ve identified a handful of minor problems that he’s promptly fixed. And I made one feature request that’s in the works too. (I offered to try to try to write the feature myself, which he politely declined. I really didn’t want to learn how to write in Ruby anyway, but I felt compelled to offer.)
And when this blog has run it’s course, I should be able to easily pull it into my archive site as well. It’s a nice feeling to have this long standing problem resolved.
