Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Blog migration
Switching the tool for exactly the same work is the stuff I absolutely try to avoid, but it seems that maintaining your own blog software, even if for the right reasons, is still the wrong thing to do. I want to focus on writing my thoughts down, and solutions for that exists.
Yes, your hosted blog solution may get hacked, it will get owned, the provider will go bust. It’ll all happen, eventually. And then it’ll be too late to think about exporting your data, or backups. But they come with many time saving features, so that if we compare the amortized costs, the ready-made solution might still win. Let’s see how well it goes with Posterous, it seems to have all the features I need (I can even send my blog posts via e-mail). Wordpress might have been the obvious candidate, but it also attracts all the script kiddies these days. Too big for its own good, one might say.
Importing my blog posts
For importing my blog contents, I briefly checked the provided API, but then did something that will earn me no respect among my colleagues: I did the import manually and chose to ignore comments completely. Here’s why: I figured out that each post will take me less than 2min, and I had some 60 blog posts to import. So the expected import time was 2h, and even with a Scotty factor of 1.5, this still seemed faster than trying to write an import script, or an import mailer. I don’t expect to have to do this very often, and even if I had to do this once every year, it would probably still cost me less than a day, sadly (read: not worth it to write a script).
The most important aspect though: There’s uncertainty in any kind of software development and the manual blog post import had already proven itself to just work. I am a risk-aversive rational person in general, so the choice, for me, was obvious. This also shows that I derive little motivation from writing software as such; I need to be convinced by the utility new software provides, or that it at least improves efficiency.
Sometimes I wish I could just switch off my rationality though, and enjoy hacking more.
The remaining bit is to redirect the RSS feeds, hoping that the planets will deal with the old posts correctly and have a heuristic that takes the post’s date into account.
