I implemented proper pagination between archive pages last night, which should help making getting around the site slightly easier. I still need to implement pagination for pages/posts that are split into distinct pages. I’m not going to implement comment pagination, because I don’t like it.
Alongside this, I’ve added some templates for archive pages and search results. There’s nothing much to these, but it does give me flexibility to give these their own special formatting if I want to.
I need to come up with a better archive page than the current “Sitemap”. The current “design” was inspired by the archive page on Daring Fireball. It works fine if you’re only posting a couple of items a week, but in January I posted 112 items1. I’ll probably keep the sitemap for discoverability purposes, but a more friendly archive page has been added to the todo list.
That’s almost twice the previous high water mark of August 2018. ↩
Over the weekend I started a fun little project. I’m tracking down and integrating as much of my old blog content as I can, across all of the sites I’ve written over the years.
I’m not going to integrate every last bit of content I find, just the “highlights” (some things are best left forgotten…). Linkblog entries, and projects with no relevance will be left behind. So far I’ve added around about 26 entries covering from 2003-2009. No doubt I’ll go back over these years and add more, as the content resurfaces. Where possible I am preserving the original formatting and links, though in some cases I will have to link to an Internet Archive page.
The impetus for this little personal project came from realising I had neglected and discarded a lot of my history. As I’ve moved from site to site, platform to platform, I’ve usually wanted to “start fresh”, to see if it gives me that impetus I need to keep the blogging habit going. So far that approach has rarely worked, so why allow the old content to disappear? It’s a shame I thought of this so late. There’s large holes in 10 years of content charting my growth as a person lost to the void.
In the content I have found I have noted a marked difference to how I am now. I used to be quite open, generally had a more upbeat, less formal tone, and was more inclined to create something for the sake of releasing it to the world. Entries were generally short, and more frequent, but punctuated occasionally by something more in-depth. It’s interesting, and definitely something I’m going to reflect on.
As a side-note, with the content moving over, I’ve redirected traffic visiting the old domains to a landing page on this site. Although most of the sites had been inactive for a while, or the content otherwise not available, it would be wrong to just leave them to expire without giving someone the chance to find what they were looking for. Besides, Fickle Me might decide to reuse the domain in the future!
Of course, if you want to check out the “historical” content, head on over to the Archive page.
