Ken's Gen

I’ve been quiet lately about my issues with whether to publish my old posts immediately or just re-publish them as new posts. Everyone has opinions about my issue, some good and some bad. It seems that some even want to invent conversations, judge, etc… but I don’t want to dwell on the negative here!

First, for those new to it, let me give you a short history of the situation. In April of 2010 my family and I relocated to North Carolina. We were busy trying to get settled in (finding jobs, finding a place, etc…) and during this time I forgot to pay for my website hosting renewal. It wasn’t until I went to post something in June that I realized my site was no longer around. Everything was gone. I could have had it all restored for a hefty sum but I didn’t have the money at the time. I just accepted the fact that everything was gone. I started my blog over in June 2010, losing the previous 3 years of blogging. I blogged happily along until around Valentine’s Day of 2011. On that day I found a backup of my blog. It only contained posts from March 2007 to December 2008 but it was something. It took me a while to figure it out but I finally figured out how to get them back.

Somewhere along the line, I either unpublished those posts or I just never actually re-published them. I really can’t remember how I got into the conundrum I am in today. Either way, I found myself trying to recreate my blog in 2012 (not actually implemented until January of this year) and I’ve been trying to figure what to do with those posts. I’ve been back and forth about it and I have finally come to a decision.

After a lot of thinking, I’ve decided to integrate all those posts back into my blog as they were originally published. If you notice, at the bottom of my blog pages it now says “2007-2013 Ken’s Gen”. In other words, I’m going along like nothing ever happened, even though the missing posts from 2009 and early 2010 are still not there. I’m working on that.

There have been quite a few comparisons in deciding what to do. I compared it to a shop owner wanting to make the “window shoppers” want to come in. Someone else compared it to updating a book and ditching the book and rewriting it (I never said that one) and today I will make one last comparison. A blog (short for web log) is always compared to a journal. If we are keeping a journal, no matter how our life changes we always keep that journal. If you want it to be read properly you don’t go tearing pages out because folks will not understand what is going on. My blog is a journal of my genealogy journey. Along the way I have interacted with many people and a lot of those people have linked back to posts I have published! Me not publishing things is like tearing a page out of my journal. It’s not nice to the flow of the story. It’s also not nice to interrupt the flow of their story!

There have been some workarounds to try to make this work properly. I use a  different permalink structure than I did in my early blogging. Because of that, even though I have allowed those posts back a lot of the links to them still do not work. I have found a plugin that helps with that. I’ve checked it on some of my Carnival of Genealogy posts. Initially none of those links would work but now they do. I’m not sure how it works but the plugin seems to be doing the job.

So, to update where I am at today. Every post that was contained in my backup is back online with the original publish dates and, hopefully, working links. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was all that easy?

The text of the posts is there. The picture links do not work. I’ve been going through and uploading the pictures for these posts. I’ve done the posts for 2007 and 2008. I also went in today and published 10 posts from April 2009 that were recovered using The Wayback Machine. I still have a long way to go and if you see a lack of posting, you will probably be able to figure out that I am still working on this.

What’s next? I still have to go back through all these posts and assign them to a category and add tags to them. I also have more posts that I’ve recovered from The Wayback Machine that I have to publish. It’s going to take a while to get them all done but when I do, my blog will be back to it’s original glory!

Maybe that’s why I didn’t want to do this before! It’s a lot of work! I’m just glad that I can do it instead of fretting about losing everything. Plus, reading through some of those old posts I have gotten some ideas about new posts and I also have discovered some series I had going that I needed to complete and discovered a few good ideas that I had forgotten about. I’m not trying to brag because I don’t consider myself a great writer but there are also some really good posts contained in there.

I’ll update you all more on this later. For now it is time to get back to work.

Have a great day,

Ken

Tags: news, updates