Inspired by Ton’s mention of an on this day page for his blog, I created a similar page for mine: it links to all the posts written on the current day of the current month, back to 1999.
I also created a companion RSS feed: subscribing to this will get you a flow of barrel-aged posts.
Having been at this for 21 years (long enough that I didn’t even think of mentioning it when the anniversary clock ticked over on May 31, 2020), there’s almost 40% of my life reflected in these pages, and thus lots I don’t remember writing, lots I’m vaguely uncomfortable having written (mostly on matter of style or naïvety). But there is also lots to remember.
Many of the posts from the early days suffer from formatting issues, broken images, and so on, and I’ve never come up with a sustainable method for editing them; I’m going to try doing this in 365 chunks, editing each day’s “on this day” posts as best I can to make them ship-shape. I’ll leave broken links that link elsewhere in place, for posterity, but where I can find missing images, or better versions of existing images, I’ll edit the posts and replace them.
Prepare to reminisce.
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That is what I have been using my widget for the past year and half (I added the widget early last year): looking at older postings and fixing things. I also add back lost images from the Internet Archive (I am missing a folder of images from my migration to WP from MT), and sometimes fix links (if the linked-to blog is still there, or if it isn't I might add internet archive links)
It's mostly to make sure I can make sense of my own blog archive.
I must say that in the two days I’ve been seeing “on this day” posts I am surprised at my prolificness in earlier years, and I am getting a much better sense of the arc of time, and the order of events.
I’m also doubly-committed to never, ever hosting images anywhere that I do not control: while I was able to automatically migrate Flickr images, the death of Share on OVI, Nokia’s onetime image-hosting services, caught me unawares and has left a lot of broken images during the years I used it as an image host.