Blog Upkeeping

I was digging through a drawer a few days ago and I came across a "web server backup" that I had made in late 2005. At that time, I was still administering a web server from work which I used to host Gloop.net. The domain name, and the server, have both long since been dead and forgotten. With them went a lot of pictures that I had put in my blog over the years. I have always been a little sad that my older blog posts are now photo-less and plagued with dead link boxes.

Vowing to fix the image problem, I slowly began to work my way through old blog posts identifying the images that are now dead, and fixing them by uploading them to Blogger (which actually uses Picassa to store them). Hopefully Blogger.com will outlive me, and I never have to worry about repairing dead links again.

I was only halfway through the year 2003 when I realised that my Blog has some other problems. Namely that my commenting feature has always been hosted by Haloscan.com. At the time I started my blog, the Blogger service did not have a commenting feature. This of course predates when Google bought them ... and it was before Wordpress ever came into existence. In it's hayday, Haloscan served me well. These days, their servers are slow as hell and add what seems like a 45 second delay to my page loadings.

I have spent a good two to three hours copying those Halsoscan comments and pasting them into my Blogger entries. So if you are rolling back in time and reading old Blog entries they will appear in the post as "Historic Comments". Future comments will now be hosted by Blogger! I could have just switched to Blogger comments, and dumped the old ones. But I love reading those old comments from my friends. :-)

I also dropped a new theme overtop of the old one, which I have probably had for at least 3 years .... maybe longer. It's not what I want - but I will work on that later. Now, I need to cook dinner. I'm making Strombolli!