Rewriting History vs Conservation

In creating this newest incarnation of my blog I’ve striven to ensure that I don’t lose all historical content by exporting previous incarnations of Wordpress instances I’d used over time, but despite best efforts, things have gone missing over the years.

I was never a prolific poster, and would go through phases of posting and expressing myself in other ways, so over time I’d lost the screenshots and images from previous posts, articles and links that i had used as the basis of a post or referred to for further details or inspiration have expired, so overall the posts weren’t adding the value I felt they once did.

So I’ve taken three approaches:

• posts that I felt were quick to restore by recreating images/source materials I would do that
• posts that were reliant on an external link for context or details and are now dead have been pruned
• posts where the context has been lost but I think can be recovered into a useful or relevant discussion with some extra work, has been preserved in my repository and added to my backlog

Either way I’ve striven to preserve the original content from my previous iterations (spelling mistakes and all), the only exception is to make some small alterations to remove specific references to physical locations I may have slipped in historically where these have no bearing on the content.

However, there are a stream of posts that I am intending to remove entirely from my previous work, and these are primarily posts of a reflective nature. I’m not looking to hide the fact I’d published these before, or that I’m ashamed or unhappy that I posted these in the past, its just that many of them represent a stage in my life that I’ve now passed and don’t reflect the content or tone I’m wanting to present now.

Many of them were associated with discussions on mental health support and how this drove creativity in other ways for me rather than being a purely negative experience, and the reality is that I think many people have written on these topics much more eloquently than me. What I would offer anyone with similar feelings is to ensure you have a support network around yourself, and to find a way to express your feelings. For me at that stage it was in blog posts, even if they weren’t being published, and I’ve now moved that into creative writing when I still feel the need to explore my feelings.

Here's to hoping that with this new workflow, style and focused approach to the blog that this drives me to create relevant and related content on a more frequent basis (even if its just for my own records of research I've done).