I’m out of town on a team meeting, so any further efforts at restoring the last two+ years of blog-posting to this server will be put on hold. In the meantime, I’m debating the pros and cons of simply starting over.
Certainly, there’s something to be said for having a lot of archives. Popular posts from weeks or months or years back can draw new traffic consistently, long after they were originally posted and indexed by Google. A few of the longer comment threads which lived here, such as those following my posts about David & Dale Garrett’s Scripture in Song, would be nice to restore — if for no other reason than how cool it was to hear other people’s stories about how much that music meant to them.
From an SEO perspective, there’s also a certain value to having a lot of content — SEO interests me, but the blog was hardly a money-maker, ads or no. So except for a few posts which had some sort of sentimental value… it wouldn’t really bother me that much to just leave it alone and start over.
That being said, I’ve been asking myself, if I do just choose to start from here from scratch, whether I’ll continue the blog in the same vein (a little of this and a little of that), or whether I’d try to focus on a more narrow topic. And if so, what topic? I love using, cheer-leading, and following the development of desktop Linux, but you can only write so many “is this the year of desktop Linux?” posts before it starts to drive you slightly mad.
Anyways, those are some of my thoughts. We’ll see what happens. If a reader happens to have strong feelings one way or the other on preserving blog archives for posterity versus starting over, I’d be interested to hear other points of view on the idea.
Preserving the integrity of URLs is useful - there’s nothing more annoying than hitting a link on Google that might just have the solution to that problem you have, only to get a 404 is just plain annoying.
I _still_ have the archives from the original jedimoose.org, running on blosxom, although I’m not sure if they’re working yet, on the new server….
Yes, it’s that idea, keeping indexed URLs active, that most motivates me to find a solution. I was banking on importing an xml file in order to do the import, but that seemingly simple operation has so far run into problems.
I’m still in Washington DC, and will be for a few more days… maybe when I get home I’ll see what can be done.