Clean

In October, I’ll be celebrating the tenth anniversary of this blog, which began back when I lived in Delhi, in 2004. As part of my book project, I’ve gone through a lot of old posts, re-visiting my thoughts and experiences. Reading through ten years of blogging has been a very mixed experience.

At the risk of blowing my own horn, there are a few good articles in there, some things I’ve written that I’m still very satisfied with and that manage to express meaningful ideas in a useful way.

But, as you can imagine, in ten years of personal blogging, there’s some pretty dull pieces as well. Perhaps more alarming, the blog has over 1,200 broken links, plenty of images that no longer load and quite a few posts that don’t make any sense (like updates referring to site redesigns that are no long visible or available anywhere).

And, WordPress has evolved so much in these ten years that I keep finding workarounds that are no longer relevant. When I started WordPress didn’t have tags, handled media in only the most basic of ways and our working assumptions about themes, page sizes and styling text were very different.

So, over the next month I’m going to clean up the site. First, I will backup and archive the blog as it is, just in case I ever feel tempted to revisit this current version. Then I will prune some old posts that are simply no longer relevant. After that I’ll address the broken links and some of the most glaring typos I find along the way. Then, I will move all the images stored in older file systems and transfer them to WordPress’ current media storage database (which is so much better than the way we used to manage images back in 2004). Finally, I will clean up the tags and navigation a little.

Why do all this work? Well, I see this blog as tremendously valuable in a lot of ways, but the problems created by blogging for so long in one place have made the blog less useful than it should be and a little hard to navigate. Redesigning the site without addressing these issues feels like papering over the cracks. And, deleting the site and starting afresh doesn’t sit right with me.

Right now, in a new city, with the projects I’m currently working on in music, photography and writing, this clean up really feels like the right thing to do. A fresh start that honours the journey that brought me to this place.