images – Jean Snow [.net]

The momentous landmark I reached last weekend was that I finally finished 2006, when it comes to fixing old posts — and I managed to do a big dent in 2007 this weekend, getting through January-May.

The reason it takes so long is that I’m pretty much going in every single post, either to fix the image (or images), to fix the blockquote tag (I used to quote things a lot in posts), or to add a little update note.

For the images, through Wayback Machine I manage to find the last 20 posts or so for each month (WM would save two page for each month’s archives). It’s a bit weird because for other years, there were quite a few times a month that WM would save the site, so I could find a lot more posts, but for some reason during 2006-2007, which is possibly the site’s most active period, it stopped doing that. And then after that, it’s a mix of still finding images because they were hosted on Flickr, or through a folder I have with images that were not taken from other sites. What a fucking process.

Hoping to give a big push to get through the rest of 2007 and then 2008, and after that it should take less time as the frequency of posts reduces (in 2006-2008 I’m looking at an average of 100 posts a month).

As I work at reconstructing my blog — I’m currently in the process of manually re-posting the 3 years of lost posts (2011-2014) thanks to the Wayback Machine — it has me thinking on what I want to do when I go back to older posts and start cleaning them up. I’m referring here to the fact that images didn’t really make the transition from the database I used, and so instead of having “image not found” type messages appear on those posts, on top of removing the code for the image, I’m wondering if it would be interesting to sometimes go and try to find a new image that I could add to that post. My fear though is that it could come off as a bit too “George Lucas’ Special Editions,” as I don’t want to alter what those posts represent.

But as I dig back, and re-read posts here and there, I do find that a lot of them highlight an interesting point in time in Japan’s art & design coverage (from a foreign perspective), and I am finding it a shame that these posts are missing images now — and I think the strength of my blog was always that it was a visually interesting place to visit, more than for what I was writing (which was quite basic).

On a related note, I’m now also thinking that it would be interesting to spend some time revisiting some of the things that I covered in the past, in a “where are they now” kind of way, to see how some of these things have evolved, or wether they (person, thing, or spot) still exist.

Over the years I’d really lost my excitement and interest in blogging (outside of my media consumption Tumblr), and it’s funny to me that revisiting this site’s past is what has re-energized me on that front.

Update (16/08/13): Well, managed to find and re-post pretty much all of the missing posts (the period between my last database backup in 2011 and when I started writing on Tumblr in 2014), except for the period between May 8, 2012 and June 16, 2012, which unfortunately didn’t get covered by the Wayback Machine (in part because of the changes I made to the site at the time I think, getting rid of prominent archive links). It also seems like the Wayback Machine has done a terrific job of keeping images, so although it’s gonna be a hell of a long job, I should be able to rescue most of the images for old posts.