Categories
Meta Personal

Back to the 70s

Well, it’s now October, and as you can tell, I’m still blogging quite regularly here. What started off as a throwback to what this site was like before has now awakened a muscle I hadn’t used in ages — that’s the blogging muscle — and it’s getting pumped and enjoying being in use again.

In terms of volume, following the 53 posts I wrote in August (which was done over 2 weeks), I ended up writing 72 in September. Although it doesn’t seem to reach the heights this site has seen — during its heydays of the mid to late 2000s, it would hover at around 80-100 posts per month, with an absolute peak of 138 — but considering that in those days a lot of the posts were made up of my TB.Grafico photolog and then my TB.Movel moblog (if you click on these links, you’ll find that the latest posts haven’t yet been fixed), it’s quite possible that this last month saw more actual written content than back in those days. At this point in my life, I’m probably more at ease with writing a post quickly.

I’m curious to see what October will bring.

Categories
Meta

Image Hunter

Yet another weekend spent repopulating old posts with images, and the bad news is that it’s getting harder. I’m starting to have a hard time finding old posts as the site started moving towards pagination within monthly archives (which I think is when I moved from Movable Type to WordPress for my blog engine), and a lot of the pages weren’t saved by the Wayback Machine. And as I peek forward, it looks like there are years where WM barely grabbed anything, so I’m not quite sure how much I’ll be able to save, but we’ll see.

The good news is that at least all of the photos that I took are saved — the ones that are part of my TB.Grafico photolog — as I found a folder on my computer that had them all.

But I do really like seeing all of the images that accompanied regular posts, and so I do hope I can still manage to find a lot of them, even if it does continue to suck up a lot of time — it takes me about an hour per month I think, and I’ve just reached September 2004.

Why am I spending so much time doing this? I think it’s the archivist/historian (I majored in History) in me that’s finally coming out and taking over.

Categories
Meta

A Day’s Work

I just spent the entire day — over 12 hours — working on my site/blog. That may sound crazy, but it’s been a rather enjoyable experience.

The first half of the day was spent recreating posts that were missing from my archives (as I described in this post). Since then, I’ve been making my way through all of my posts, starting with the very first one in 2002, and re-inserting images/photos that I get from the Wayback Machine. I’ve just reached the end of 2003.

Yes, it’s long work, but the reason I’m still at it is because it’s turned out to be an amazing look back at what I was up to in those days, and how the site evolved and turned into the “design guide” that a lot of people remember, and which led to me eventually starting a career in writing.

The other fascinating thing is that I’m rediscovering things that I’ve done that I had completely forgotten about. Hey, a huge part of my site was a photolog called TB.Grafico — how do you forget that? And I’ve also realized that my Tokyo Boy moblog (oh yeah, short for “mobile blog,” that was a thing back in those days) actually ran on its own blog installation, and so has been basically unavailable online for years, even before I had my server issues (and I do plan on rescuing it once I’m done going through my regular posts). Oh, and I produced an ezine called Geisha, and right now I have no idea how to find any of the issues (at least 9 I think), or if there’s any chance that I’ll be able to dig up any of them.

This entire process is certainly going to take weeks, and I’m happily looking forward to it.