I just noticed that I started transitioning the Movable Type pages over a year ago, since last May. Still at it. Actually, some of the posts may yet be recoverable so I might go back through some of them and see what I can recover.

Basically, I have the early stuff done up through 2003. As for the rest, August 2009 on should be mostly there (like I said, found some archives to maybe reclaim some lost posts). Hopefully I can get the 2004-2009 stuff done in the coming months since I obviously wasn’t posting a whole hell of a lot back then. And what I did was a mish-mash dump of links that had zero coherence. In short, probably what my brain will turn into going forward.

One of the things I regret are not being able to migrate some posts from long ago. Basically, Flash. It died and when I can’t find a newer form of the video, it is lost to the ages.

Similar problem when some news sites never migrated video. At best there’s a transcript but often not even that.

Some things age poorly. But not to be a hypocrite, I will keep those posts when possible. At one time these were folks I listened to. Whether they or I changed is up for grabs.

One thing I really find myself doing is over posting images. At times I would make a sampling of images, like a This Modern Met post on Chinese cultural groups. I had only posted about a half dozen originally. This time I put all they had. My on-site data storage is climbing fast but at least I will have the items in question unless *my* servers die.

I don’t mean the network as a whole so much as a technical complaint.

I have had to edit/kill dozens of posts in the blog transfer process solely because I can’t find the video link I had once referenced. Not even a page or a link to a new page when I can’t embed the video anymore (thanks Comedy Central!).

Are they incapable of keeping an institutional history? Seems like something a news network from decades ago should be better at.

So, you may have noticed the wiki is down-ish. I tried upgrading it and it failed miserably despite a couple of attempts at upgrading the sub-components it relies on.

So…I installed an auto-updating MediaWiki from the tools the hosting company provides. The pages – few that there are – are moved over. No biggie there.

However…the images are going to be a pain to move I think. And a lengthy try at each step. So, bear with me. I bit off more than I can chew but I think it will work out better in the long run. Or so I hope.

One new twist as I have gone through 2012 and going further into the past.

A lot of these old links have been built with old code, so they sure don’t look right sometimes.

Others, however, are bringing up security errors and browser warnings.

In those cases, I am not reposting them. The past can be dangerous and I’m not wrecking your computer because I wanted to remember a pithy comment over a decade old. It isn’t worth it to either of us.

Still trying to harvest old posts. It stinks. That said, I have been utilizing Code Embed to get old videos and streams up (when it can). I may be using it all wrong but oh well.

Sometimes I can post videos but YouTube, CBS, and NBC hate to embed off their site. The Daily Show links are either dead or ad-blocked. Sometimes you’ll just see a Video Link entry. Use that.

Dead links mean either lost posts or edits. Bill Maher links are either dead or, since he’s become a worm, aren’t worth the work of recovering/redirecting unless the point was a very good one.

The work continues….

The more I recover from the old blog, the more I am limited by how technology ages and dies.

A lot of the videos I had posted were in Flash, which doesn’t leave a lot of link artifacts. Or when it does, it does not leave a lot I can point to new, fresher videos.

Also, pages die. And not even the Wayback Machine can account for all of that.

And then, proprietary rights. CBS, particularly Sunday Morning, has always been a source for me but good luck embedding any videos from there. They have about 10 years of stuff moved over to YouTube, which helps, except that I am into early 2013 posts now and the ship has sailed for the time being. And then, not *all* YouTube links go into WordPress properly, so sometimes you will see a link rather than an embedded vid.

Sorry.

Been trying to recover posts from the old Movable Type pages. It is hard since a lot of it is deprecated and unusable. That said, I keep running into dead links – video, images – from sites that are gone or from technology (Flash) that no longer functions. So, I am just leaving those posts behind.

Am I self-censoring? Maybe, but I don’t mean to. In some cases I literally cannot translate the code over in such a way that WP can even recognize it.

Progress I guess.

In the interests of rolling everything over to WordPress, I am going to start backfilling posts from both the old Movable Type blog and what remains of the original pages I had created way back when, with the hopes of getting rid of both. This will, of course, take a long time but if you see stuff disappear or duplicate here or there, that’s why.