I have been asking myself this question for the better part of an hour now. I should be sleeping right now, but I ended up taking a 3 hour nap on the couch after dinner with Jackson and am wide awake now. Thank God I am off tomorrow else I might be in a little bit of trouble right now.
Anyway, I started going though on of my favorite time killers Archive.org. I typed in my original site’s address (twev1701.com) and started making a local visual archive of my site. In doing so, I started reading all of the old posts.
Time for a quick history lesson. My site started back at the end of 2001 with the purchase of the twev1701.com domain. I then purchased hosting, and tried to figure out how to make my own blog. I ended up using a program for the actual posts called NewsPro. It was a PERL based program, and quite easy to install and use. The downside was that it used its own database, not my MySQL. This meant that when I needed to re-install NewsPro or change servers, I could not do a simple dbase backup and restore. To be honest, I never really thought about that. I never could have imagined back in 2001 that I would still be doing this 8 years later. Anyway, when the time did come for me to change servers, I upgraded to the newest version, which was then called Coranto. In doing so however, I lost all of my previous posts. Eventually, years later on January 27, 2004, I installed a true blogging script called Movable Type. Then, a few short months later in April of 2004, tragedy stuck when I was screwed over by my then web host and lost not only my domain, but my entire site. Luckily, I had a backup! I then purchased the twev1701.net domain name that I use to this day, and got myself a new web host. In doing so, I decided to switch over to WordPress. I converted by local copy of my Movable Type dbase, and viola! I still use WordPress to this very day.
Why the huge history lesson? Because in looking back at the old twev1701.com archive, I got to thinking about 2 things. First, has my website become so complicated now, that the fun of tweaking it is gone? Secondly, am I the only person who misses static pages instead of dynamically generated database driven pages? I know it’s very 2002 thinking, but color me nostalgic. Don’t get me wrong, I love the automation that modern day scripting has afforded webmasters such as myself. But there’s still something to be said about a nice, hand coded site.
Another thought I had (and a project for another day) while looking though the archive is to go back and salvage as many old pre Movable Type posts that I can and adding them to my WordPress database. The one nice thing about that is that I can preserve the date and time of each post. It would only take a few hours to do, and I think having the inclusion of these vintage posts would benefit my site overall. Yep, it’s settled. That’s another project added to my list.
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Twev1701.net is written by Trevor Shafer. Here you will find interesting articles about science fiction, computers, technology, and life in general. You may also find not-so-interesting articles about the weather, his cats, how he tends to hurt himself quite often, and life in retail. You will also find lots of half-naked women populating these digital pages. 
