I am finally tired of the chaotic structure (viva la oxymoron) pf this, and some of my other weblogs and I decided to go ahead and clean them up. The Blog Cleaning to end all Blog Cleanings.
What I thought would be an easy task, isn’t. In itself, the technical aspect of it, it’s really trivial. If there are no comments on a posting, I can just copy and paste it; otherwise I have to do some import and export magic. Really, no matter.
But what I found to be incredible difficult is to rip apart my history of blogging. I’ve posted some stuff on here that’s really superfluous. people really need to know I ordered ADSL in Frankfurt nine years ago?
Then there’s some stuff I’d probably not post today – nothing really bad, just… not perfect for a site any potential customer, a future employer (no, I am not looking…), girlfriend (I am still not looking, I am using these as examples, don’t hit me honey! *ouch*), or any total stranger could look up. For example, I used to have a neighbor who liked to undress at the window. It’s there, in a bemused posting I made way back when it wasn’t even socially acceptable to call a blog a blog.
Then there are potentially harmful postings. Example: A rant ridiculing the ITIL fashion. Yeah, seven years ago you didn’t need ITIL if you had some common sense. But I’m now a project manager and service manager. I understand that ITIL is a reference that saves people from having to come up with that stuff themselves, and it provides for a common ground and terminology. But reading that old blog posting could give a potential employer a completely wrong impression of myself. I need ITIL as a tool and, more importantly, I need – and my employer needs me to have – ITIL as a badge to show off to my customers. So I actually “parked” this post already.
Another case are posts I really do not have any other home for. I could move my book reviews to my new Kindle blog, but then what about my DVD reviews? Shouldn’t I just keep them all together? I don’t want to start a reviews blog, really. A similar situation for my tech posts (though I have a solution for those), or my travel posts, or the ones about RIFT and World of Warcraft. And if I move all of these, my personal blog will have very little “meat” left.
A final and very special example is a post about Wizard of the Coast’s search for a new setting. It’s just a snippet, really, but it’d perfectly fit in with my world building blog. Except – That post is from 2002 and my world building blog started in 2008. Do I really want a lone post from the past in there? Doesn’t seem to be very useful.
I haven’t really figured out a good solution yet. I don’t want to delete too much. In a way, this blog and its ten year history are dear to me. And once you destroy data, you won’t get it back.
I think I must consider this matter in greater depth before I go ahead.
