landmarkish

I did it.  Sweet mother mary on a sesame seed bun, I did it.  All 627 posts have been categorized and tagged. There’s a few stragglers that I have to take care of due to some database errors, but 99% is close enough for now. Image and text links have been successfully restored for about half of the posts.  It took a solid 15 hours of work, but for the first time, most of the content on this blog is once again properly viewable and accessible.

Categories and tags

Until I find a decent method of displaying tags (I hate tag clouds), only the categories will be accessible.  I tried to be as consistent as possible, but it’s no small task.  “life” ended up being my catch-all category (since I didn’t want anything uncategorized).  Everything from 2005 and back is under high school; after that point, I start using it less frequently once I was writing posts that weren’t just standard teenage blather.  There are some humor tags, but I also attempted to identify certain common threads.  Some examples:

  • surveys & quizzes – a tribute to the many “Which anime angel are YOU?” quizzes I took
  • now all i need is a girlfriend – when the biggest problem in my life was being a virgin
  • skool – the days when i thought it was “kool” to spell school incorrectly
  • linkin park – CRAAAAWLING IIIIIIN MY SKIIIIIIN, THESE WOOOOUNDS THEY WIIIIILL NOT HEEEAAAAALL

Images

If you look at the categories, media -> photos will take you to some of the picture posts over the ages.  For about half of these, the pictures may be lost forever; I tagged them anyways because I’m still holding out hope that I can find them somewhere (I’ve got an IDE hard drive sitting in my attic that belongs to my first computer – possible gold mine). A few of the more worthwhile posts:

Conversations

A number of posts in 2004 were IM chat logs I posted where I proudly carried my anachronisms into the battlefield of teenage debate.  Some of them survived, but about half of them appear to be irrevocably lost because I posted them to an “archive” blog (I remember nothing about this) which I somehow ended up losing or deleting.  I also failed to find my final paper for my global studies class wherein I wrote 12 pages (for a 6 page assignment) championing climate change denialism.  I mourn the loss of these relics, and hope that I can find them again some day.  I know that some of you have made backups of my blog to make sure I never take any of this stuff down to pretend it never happened – if you happen to have saved any of this content, I’d sure love to have it again.

Aside: I saw my teacher (Shenk) for that global studies class at a softball game last year.  She didn’t recognize me, but I told her who I was and apologized profusely for making her suffer through that paper.  She seemed grateful.

Comments

The biggest task remaining is the integration of the old comments.  These comments are stored in 4 massive XML files; I’m not even sure how to reliably match the comments with the associated post yet.  If anyone’s curious, these are the 4 files (I linked them in the previous post but the links have changed):

I’m currently teaching myself PHP and SQL for work, so hopefully in a few months I’ll have the skills necessary to accomplish this.  That said, I would really not be opposed if someone decided to craft me up a half-Christmas present and figured a way to transfer these.  There’s some pretty amazing dialogue contained in there, and at least half of the spirit of the blog’s earliest years played out in the comments.  This was, at one time, an incomprehensibly popular place.

More thoughts to come on this entire project.  It’s been pretty fascinating.

EDIT: Comment displays for current articles are still not very attractive, but they’re at least functional.

EDIT2: That search function is excellent. Try searching for your name, it works pretty damn well.