Categories
Burningbird

Lessons learned from the Wayback Machine

I’ve learned many lessons from recovering weblog posts from the Wayback Machine.

If you feel the need to freshen your site, you really don’t need a new domain or subdomain, and most of the time you don’t need a new site redesign. All you need, is a break.

It’s OK to mix content types. So what if your techie stuff is side by side with your poetry? People can skip what they don’t like.

Don’t ever embed a dependency on a third-party web site for anything. So many of my recovered posts referenced photos in an account on Flickr that I no longer have. I recovered most images, but not all.

If you’re going to embed a tweet, embed a screenshot of the tweet and then provide a direct link to it. That way if the account is gone, you don’t end up with gibberish in your page.

For your own media, be wary of using the weblogging software add media functionality. In the process of recovering my writings, I decided to go from a WordPress multisite to a single site installation. It wasn’t a complicated task—export site’s content, install a fresh WordPress installation, and import the site—but the export/import munged the media I had added using the WP Add Media functionality.

(Thankfully, there’s a plugin, Broken Link Checker, that helped me find the broken image links and get them fixed.)

Don’t use excerpts on the front page, or the category page, or archive. I lost some writing because the Wayback Machine had a post in the main page, but hadn’t captured the actual post page, itself. When I displayed the full contents on the main page, I was able to recover the writing. When I didn’t…well, that writing was lost.

Lastly, even when recovering old posts I still left internal links to the Wayback Machine. So much of the older stuff is gone but still preserved in the Wayback Machine.

And if the post had comments, I included a link to the Wayback Machine entry at the top of my posts so that folks can see it, and the discussion, in its original form.

 

Categories
Burningbird Just Shelley

Weblog Penance

How many times have I written about this change or that to my site? Not enough, it seems.

I’m in the process of using that wonderful, magnificent site The Wayback Machine to recover posts from all my various incarnations of weblogs and whatnot sites. Yes, I do have backups from recent sites, but not the ones from 1998, or 2003, or 2015, and so on. And certainly not all the posts for all variations of weblogs I’ve had.

I estimate now that I’ve had a weblog, split or singular, on 83 domains and subdomains. Does anyone remember Thank the NRA? Bad Kitty? Missouri Green? Practical RDF? BB Gun? Script Teaser?

I split my weblog and combined it dozens of times, utilizing 23 different domains, and probably twice that many subdomains.

Even my main site, my weblog, this thing here…it’s been accessed as http://weblog.burningbird.net http://yasd.com, http://burningbird.net/weblog, and http://just.shelleypowers.com, in addition to the burningbird.net location.

To make things even more interesting, sometimes the article URIs would be listed as ‘fires’, other times as ‘nodes’, sometimes as the full date, and finally, just the post title.

I was on Blogger, and on Graymatter, on Movable Type and Drupal, on Radio, and now on WordPress. I began with manually coded static web pages, back before weblogs and weblogging software were things. I even tried my hand at creating my own weblogging software: Wordform, a  fork of the early WordPress software.

And not since the very earliest days have I had all of my writings in one single site.

So, I’m recovering each writing/post/article, one at a time, either from my own backups, or mostly from the Wayback Machine. I’ve already recovered over 1300 posts, but I estimate I have about 4000 or so to go.

I think it was Tim Bray who spoke out, decades ago, about the wrongness of missing webpages—the 404s we have come to know and dislike. That’s the beauty of The Wayback Machine: web pages aren’t gone for good, they’re just finding a comfortable niche to settle into for a good sleep.

Thanks to Internet Archive for providing The Wayback Machine, I’ll be able to restore most of my writing. However, I shouldn’t use the word ‘restore’ to describe what I’m doing. After all, ‘restoring’ sounds somewhat noble—as if I’m taking a fine old web site and returning it to its glory.

I’m really not restoring my web sites: I’m doing penance for not being able to sit still for 26 years.

Categories
Just Shelley Weblogging

Weblogging and 9/11: Something kind of broken

We look at today’s social media world post-Trump Presidency and we see a highly disconnected and fragmented world. The media proclaims it’s never seen society so polarized, but we’ve always been polarized. The only difference now is who controls the visibility of the fragments.

Unlike earlier years, what was fit to print, or fit for all of us to know, was controlled by the media. First the newspapers, then radio, and finally TV.

Now, we’re all publishers, even if all we publish is 280 character blurbs to a handful of people. And as publishers, every single one of us proclaims as loudly and emphatically as we can our interests and our beliefs, and all too frequently, our disagreements. It’s a wonder we can still think with all this chaotic noise.

It never used to be this way I think to myself, as I spend time recovering old weblog pages from the Wayback Machine. Before there was Twitter, and before there was Facebook or TikTok or Instagram, we had weblogging: a tightly integrated community of early practitioners who linked each other in a continuing dialog that was equally special and mundane, profound and silly.

Yet at the very beginning, we were broken.

9/11 and the rise of social media

Weblogging wasn’t the first example of social media. I’d say that honor goes to Usenet, which was fairly popular before the invention of the web. But weblogging made social media accessible to everyone, not just enthusiasts and geeks.

This page is as good a history of weblogging as I can find online. As you can see, weblogging started not long after the web, itself, though the number of webloggers began small. But this all changed with 9/11.

I remember watching the horrific events of 9/11 unfold in real time on TV that day. We watched as the planes hit and the towers fell. In the days after 9/11,  many of us wanted to reach out to people, to connect, and to talk about the events and try to make sense of what happened.

At the same time, our country was in a virtual lockdown. We’ve forgotten with the recent COVID-related restrictions that this isn’t the first time the country has been locked down. It isn’t even the first in recent history. The photo at the beginning of this writing is one I took from my apartment in San Francisco. Two days after 9/11 the military showed up with barbed wire and concrete barricades, blocking off a major street in order to protect the machinery of the Bay Bridge.

A combination of wanting to connect while physically distanced combined with new tools and inexpensive hosting led to an explosion of weblogs. And thanks to blogrolls and linking, we formed communities of seemingly like-minded people who became close even though we might be on the other side of the world from each other.

However, if 9/11 brought us together, the events following 9/11 soon started tearing us apart.

9/11 and the fracturing of social media

What brought on this writing was spotting a graphic from a Wayback Machine archived page of my friend Jeneane Sessum’s Allied weblog. I had recently discovered my old Radio weblog pages in the Wayback Machine, and shared the discovery with my Facebook friends. Many of these friends are people I’ve known for decades now because of our earlier weblogging connections. So, I posted links to some of their pages, too.

In a page from 2002, Jeneane had posted a sidebar graphic that read “1st off Mike Sanders’ Blog”.

Graphic reads 1st off Mike Sanders' BlogI hadn’t thought about this event, or Mike Sanders, in years. The graphic brought back the memories, albeit a bit fuzzy from time.

I searched throughout my Wayback Machine archives for the same time frame, and found the post that explained what this was about. I’ve recovered it to Burningbird, but you also have to look at the page in context.  It links a March 1, 2002 weblog posting that read:

I was out of town but had to return early.

This morning I received an email from Mike Sanders asking me to remove his weblog link from my blogroll and he has removed my weblog from his. The reason is because of my “moral equivalency” arguments last week, and because I linked to Daniel Ord’s piece Stereopticon in Friday’s post.

According to Mike:

    • Unfortunately some of my fellow bloggers understand and/or support both the Palestinian terrorist reign against Israel and terrorism against the US. I can longer in good conscious include those people on my blogroll list and I respectfully request anybody who understands or supports Palestinian terrorism or Islamic terrorism to please remove my name from your blogroll list as well.

I wrote the following in an email to a friend, regarding my posting on Friday:

    • No one noticed in my posting, my use of “viewpoint”, not opinion. Though sometimes treated as synonyms, they aren’t the same thing. A viewpoint is a point of view, the culmination of all our life’s experiences. How we see things. From this issues both action and opinion. Without understanding and respecting each other’s viewpoints, we can’t hope to understand where each of us is coming from when we speak or act.
    • I started my list with Ord because he is doing just that — he’s showing two viewpoints of the same incident. Without understanding the Palestinian viewpoint of the WTC tragedy, we can’t hope to stop these incidents from happening again, because we’ll never understand why they happened in the first place. The title of his piece tells us this — stereopticon.
    • stereopticon — viewpoint
    • I deliberately listed absolutely conflicting opinions, and invited the audience to understand the different viewpoints.

My first time being accused of supporting terrorism

Two things made Sanders’ email stand out. The first was that it was the only time when someone had asked me to remove a weblog link, not just remove a link to my page from their weblog. Today, this would be equivalent to someone on Twitter blocking you, but having to ask your permission, first.

The second was being accused of supporting terrorism because we weren’t willing to condemn Palestinian actions post 9/11. Mike Sanders was a strong supporter of Israel. In the process, he not only stepped over the line into Islamophobia, he raced across it. To the point where he would label us terrorists solely because we were willing to listen to other viewpoints.

Being labeled a terrorist by some extreme conservative isn’t all that unusual on Twitter or Facebook today, but it was a shock back in the early days of weblogging. Especially when the person leveling the accusation was a friend, or at least, you thought he was a friend.

And the fragments would only grow as our group broke into pieces over the Bush invasion of Iraq.

Killing the Blogroll

My response to the Sanders’ request was to eliminate my blogroll in its entirety. I had been considering doing so anyway, because I thought it was better to introduce folks through my writing and referencing them, rather than a static list of links in the side of the page.

If you random sample my old weblog URL on the Wayback Machine in later years, you won’t see a blogroll. Hell, you won’t even see more than one page column to my site now, in deference to mobile devices.

Mike Sanders’ request was the tipping point to the decision. I didn’t want to list or be listed or be beholden or not to someone because of links or not. I didn’t want to endorse or be endorsed. If I liked what someone wrote, I wanted to point it out to folks. If I wrote something interesting, I hoped for the same.

barbed wire

Thankfully, I never had anyone email me and tell me not to link to their writing. Perhaps this will change as I become more active in this space again.

End of Story

So much writing about something that happened so long ago. And probably much ado about nothing.

Mike Sanders quit his weblog that December, but he was back weblogging the following spring. And yes, he had a blogroll, and yes, I was on it.

It wasn’t as easy for me to push it all aside, though. It wasn’t just being accused of supporting terrorists. It was the idea that someone felt that they could tell me what I could or could not do on in my own web space.

Yet here I am, on Facebook and Twitter, letting them tell me what I can or cannot do in my own space.

There’s something kind of broken about that.

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Weblogging

Weblogging: More Than Words

Two friends have stopped by to say hi since I turned comments back on.

Bill mentions the Radio Userland days,which puts us back in very ancient weblogging territory. So ancient that today’s TikTok kids weren’t even born when we got together in Userland pages.

I also used to have a Userland Manila weblog, but those days are permanently gone. The Manila weblogs were lost in the Wayback Machine because of a bot-killer Dave Winer implemented. Sad, but such is life.

AKMA also stopped by and discussed doing weblog  recovery for his space, but what about the comments? We can recover the words, but we can’t recover the comments.

Indeed this is the biggest loss when we’ve moved our spaces all about: we can move our words, but we’ve left the community behind.

Thankfully, Wayback Machine rode in and saved the internet. Not only does it preserve a page, it preserves the theme of the page, the look and feel and in-place context. It also frequently preserved the comments.

I may have recovered the words to Cheap Eats at the Semantic Web Cafe in this space, but the Wayback Machine saved everything else about that old posting in its space. And I’m eternally grateful for the gift it’s given us.

You see what I did there? I did weblogging.

Categories
Writing

The Old is…still old but at least it’s back

The second part of my Burningbird server re-awakening from the dead is my effort to find any and all past writings and import them into this weblog, one at a time.

I’ve had so many variations of weblogs: some at domains I’ve controlled, others at domains I haven’t. I was able to export the posts from many of the domains, but I haven’t loaded them back into this place. The task just seemed too daunting.

Then I realized something: I’m retired. I can do stuff like this now.

As I note in my About page, you can see many of my writings thanks to the wonderful people at the Internet Archive, and their incredibly important Wayback Machine. Still, I want the posts in one single spot, even though so many of them are so dated.

As I import the page, I set the publication date to the original publication date, which is why you won’t be seeing them here on the front page. I may, from time to time, link an older story in a new posting, for grins and giggles.

I’ve also turned comments back on, though the comment form is a bit buried with this theme. Comments close five days after I post, so make your point quickly. Your first comment will be held in moderation, but after I approve it, you should have freedom to post at will. Do let me know if you run into issues.

It’s been fun to go through the old posts. I can’t believe some of the tech way back when. And we won’t even get into the politics.