Cleaning out 12 Years of Data Rot

I’ve had a blog here on Squarespace since 2008. Over the years, Flash has been blocked, countless video links are long gone, and connections to hundreds of other pieces of content died. I took advantage of some AC during the recent heat wave and COVID cancellations and It took me five long days to go through it all. But the site is up to date—for now.

Due to Squarespace’s and the internet’s evolution, I had to shift everything from my early attempts to embed everything, even photos. So this meant that I had to fix literally thousands of photos, replacing them from the old embedded Google Picasa photos (remember Picasa?) and flash embedded galleries to now uploaded here natively to Squarespace. For some reason too, all the embedded videos from before about 2012 were no longer working, so I had to fix all of them. So now all of my own content is here natively in Squarespace (and Vimeo) for the future.

It was incredibly tedious, but kind of fascinating too, watching the blog evolve from those pre-Facebook days into today’s relatively stable technological world. As I wrote, in my business (entertainment technology) I feel like things mostly matured in around 2010, and I would say that held true for the blog too. As I gradually moved personal and off topic stuff to Facebook, there were less and less posts here, but the posts here were more and more my own stuff.

I don’t know if anyone will ever look at any of those hundreds of posts from a decade ago, but I feel like I now have a personal time capsule that should be readable…for maybe the next 10 years.