The Great Blog Cleanup

I have moved my blog around to different platforms as much as anyone. I landed at blot sometime in 2018, and I am very happy with the platform as it fits my style perfectly. With all the moves and migrations, my collection of posts has been degraded in various ways. Broken links, missing images, formatting weirdness, etc.

This is the first time I have felt happy with my blogging setup so it was time to tackle getting things cleaned up and organized to ensure storage and portability for years into the future, and most importantly ensure all my creations are truly mine. We all remember how I lost all posts prior to 2006..
(I don't want to talk about it.) 😭

This project was mostly a manual process, with some automation sprinkled in where possible with tools like TextSoap.

So, what did I do?
Here is a list of what I set out to accomplish:

Update post metadata

• Standardized date & time format
  Date: 2020-01-01 12:00:00
• Standardize tag format (and reduce number of tags)
  Tags: This, Is, How, I, Format, Tags, Now

Update file naming convention

File names: 2020-01-01a.md
File structure hierarchy: posts > 2020 > 2020-01-01a.md

Fix broken links

I fixed any links that pointed back to posts on my own blog and attempted to fix any external links as well if possible.

Fix broken images

I attempted to fix any broken image links that I could. Some were simply not possible because I didn't have any good clues as to what they were. One of the biggest issues with images was not using centralized storage. So this means I had broken image links pointing back to various places like Wordpress and Dropbox accounts that are no longer active. I now store all my images in a dedicated bucket on Wasabi. I can now move the content to any blogging platform and all images will always link correctly. It's a tiny bit more effort up front, but very worth it!

2023-01-29 UPDATE: Check out this post on how I am doing images a couple years in the future.



This project also got me wondering how many actual posts I have (it was 319), and how they were spread across the years. Well, that turned into this little graph project! (It still needs some tweaks, but it was another great little learning project for me!)

Here is a screenshot of what it looks like!

How does this change how my blog looks to the reader? It doesn't. This was all about maintaining infrastructure and ensuring I have a safe archive of everything in my possession and that data is portable. It definitely wasn't a fun project, but I am very happy I did it!

Of course, after all this, I am assuming that both Markdown and static site generators will exist for a while into the future! 😬