On Old Blog Posts and Nostalgia

This past Saturday, I found myself in a nostalgic mood. I watched She’s Out of My League, a comedy from 2010. When the credits started rolling, it sank in that She’s Out of My League came out fourteen years ago. Mentally, it feels like five years to me.

Entertained by the humor of TJ Miller, I thought it might be a good time to finish up Silicon Valley. It’s been a few years though, so I figured I’d start at the beginning. Once the opening credits began, I saw the MySpace logo and thought to myself, “Surely, this isn’t that old” and that’s when I realized it’s been ten years since Silicon Valley debuted. I guess these things happen, you get older, and time seems to move at a different pace.

I began to wonder what I was blogging about in 2014. I no longer have copies of those blogs, so I fired up the Internet Archive and read a few posts. It really got me thinking about preservation of blog posts, which is something I’ve done a 180 on in the past year after speaking with a few people, running a small survey, and being disappointed when discovering a post I really liked no longer existed.

The posts from 2014 weren’t too bad, but as I dug a little deeper, I realized that posts written before 2010 were not to my liking. My views have changed too much, and my writing has improved. So, I began thinking about what I refer to as my modern era of blogging.

In 2017, I launched Brandon’s Horror, a non-spoiler horror movie review site. It was my first real big undertaking that I stuck with for some years. Then in 2020, I began a new personal blog, which I feel like is an extension of this site. My life had changed for the better and my blogging was more positive and less mopey. Although that blog bounced around a few platforms and a few name changes, I don’t feel all that much has changed since 2020.

Then in 2022, I launched Middle-Aged Fat Kids with a buddy of mine. I split my pop-culture related posts to that site, but overtime it was just something else to manage. Recently, I deleted both Brandon’s Horror and Middle-Aged Fat Kids.

But I’m proud of pretty much everything I wrote during this time frame, the past seven years or so. I feel like my outlook on life has been more consistent and I’ve revisited the same themes and concepts several times over the years. Thinking about these posts, I began to realize that while catering to different audiences, all of these posts were parts of me. Little pieces of Brandon being shared with the world.

I pulled out my external hard drive to see what backups of my blogs that I did have. I know I converted all of my posts since 2020 into .epubs last year, but I wanted to see what might have survived in terms of proper exports. I found some from June 2023, while incomplete, it was better than nothing.

Over the weekend I began importing these posts. If you dig into my archives now, you’ll see they expand back to 2017. The majority of these posts are missing images, have dead links, and all the other technical BS that comes with this sort of undertaking. I was still working on my posts I brought over from Scribbles, so I’ve got a ton of work ahead of me. I’m talking months’ worth of work.

Pretty much all 746 published blog posts will have to be assessed, updated, and categorized, along with another 129 in drafts. I’m also missing what I estimate to be another 150 posts I’ll need to snag from the .epub or Internet Archive.

I do have some duplicate posts that’ll need to be deleted and I’m removing any clutter posts, like little site updates or content that may have been rewritten at a later date in a more efficient way. It won’t be a complete archive and I’m sure some things will be missing, but it should be pretty close. There are also some bonus posts, stuff I wrote and never published or even a string of ten or fifteen posts I wrote last year when I stepped away from blogging for a bit.

Over time, I plan on writing a few discovery posts to help bring some of the old content to the light that I feel is worth reading, because not all of it is great. But what is posted is a pretty accurate display of my interests/views/ideas at a certain time and how I felt like sharing those.

I recently added a Search function to the sidebar and expanded the number of posts shown on each page to twenty-five. It should make sorting through the content a bit easier if there is something specific you wanted to see or are looking for.

So, as we used to say in the olden days, please excuse the construction and like all highway construction, this might take a while to get finished.