2023 Archives

I just published the last of the *recovered posts. I’ve manage to recover over 4000 posts. The last bit went faster than I expected, as I didn’t have as many posts to recover in later years.

I’ve not been chatty in this space in recent years. Months would go by before I’d write something to Burningbird. I spent more time on social media sites than I did my own space.

Elon Musk and his destruction of Twitter has been a good thing. It’s reminded us that we’re only renters in sites like Twitter and Facebook; renters at the sufferance of single overlords who could wipe out our existence on their sites with a single whim.

I have found Mastodon to be a superior offering, if for no other reason than you can pick your self up and move to another instance, or maintain your own instance, and have control over your own space. But you still don’t have permanence in Mastodon. Yes, you can move your follows and followers, and folks following you won’t even know you moved. But you can’t move your old posts.

And that’s right. Social media is intended to be today. It is now. It is a current spot where we can connect and discuss what happened today. You don’t freeze a street corner to keep alive a moment where you run into an old friend and have a great conversation. No, you will move on, your friend will move on, and that street corner becomes a place where someone else will run into an old (or new) friend.

If you want permanence, you need a home.

This is my home. This is Burningbird.

*With many, many thanks to the Internet Archive and its Wayback Machine.

Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine I have recovered over 3600 web posts dating back to 1996. I’m not done yet, but I’m getting into the detective phase of recovery. This means using all the of the tools the Wayback Machine provides for recovery.

For instance, though you get a timeline of snapshots when you search on a domain, such as weblog.burningbird.net, you can get a listing of individual pages by using the wildcard (*), such as weblog.burningbird.net/*. By doing this, I’ve been able to recover seemingly lost writings if there’s a break in navigation between pages.

Considering that I never could make up my mind how I want to display pages—under archives for a time, by year and month another time, by subdomain, separate domain, by burningbird.net others—I’ve made liberal use of the wildcard in my recovery.

Lately, I brought in a new tool: the Ruby-based program wayback_machine_downloader. I’ve tested it in both Ubuntu and Windows, and it works beautifully.

I’ve given it both domain and subdomains and bulk downloaded most of the content the Internet Archive has archived from my sites. In some cases, where I no longer control the domain, I use the –to program modifier to grab just my content and not the content of the new domain owner.

I now have a backup copy of what the Wayback Machine has, and I’ve been able to recover pages more quickly. For instance, I able to recover a fragment of a 2003 post using this approach:

We Met. We talked. We expanded. And then the Net closed in. We reduced. We compacted. The energy was too much, the space too tiny, and we burst forth with wit, despair, beauty and brilliance, laughter, anger, tears, and, ultimately, cat.

We never forget cat. Cat is our anchor when our heads float too high, and we begin to think we’re Gods on a Wire, like pigs on a stick.

It is true that many of the recovered posts will never be read by another living soul in the future. That’s not what’s important. What’s important is I’ll finally have all my stuff in one place.

And I’m having fun. The Wayback Machine and all the tools that work with it are just a kick to use. The people behind this site and the tools are the most generous folk.

I’ll have more details on my Hunt for Burningbird at a future time. I just wanted to provide a quick update. I also wanted to test out the latest update of the ActivityPub plug-in, since its creator is now part of the WordPress team.