Cleaning Up the Archives

There are some schools of thought that one should never (or almost never) delete old blog posts, or even create substantial revisions without providing notice of the change (and access to the original text.) I do not really feel that way. One of the things that can make publishing on the web (a blog, a video, a plain old web site) is the fact that it is a living thing. It’s easy to make changes and improvements.

Of course it’s not as easy to hide those changes as one might think. This is also a good thing. It helps keep people accountable.

Ease of updating is one of the most powerful things about the web.
That power should not be wielded indiscriminatly.
If nothing else one should be accountable to oneself.

I’m going through the archives and cleaning things up. Fixing spelling errors, adding titles to entries, (There are over 100 that just have a time-stamp as the title. An artifact of the port from g-blog to WordPress. I had a bad habit of not entering a title when posting.) fixing broken links, and removing some of the useless cruft.

For example: there are entries that are marked private that are never going to see the light of day. Nothing bad, but I had another habit of leaving notes for myself in the blog (One example was birthday gift ideas for my step-father) that the rest of the users (or the general public) didn’t need to see. I don’t need them anymore, so out they go.

I’m tired. I’m up too late to be writing about this coherently. I suppose I could save this as a draft and come back to it later, but whats the fun in that?

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Robert

Robert Belknap has been writing online sporadically since 2001. See the colophon for more details.

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