Old Blog Entries

I was finally able to migrate my old blog entries. Well, as much as I cared to. I pulled much of my blog from archive.org. But, it didn’t archive all the posts. For some of the posts, I only have the excerpt. I also don’t have the pictures.

I’m positive that I have archives of my site. But, considering some may be on Zip disks, it’s likely not worth the effort. As mentioned, I scraped content from archive.org. Since the layout and formatting of my site changed multiple times since 2003, it became a bit tedious to pull out a single post and apply new formatting.

To reduce the tedium, I wrote a small program to parse what I scraped. It then wrote out a markdown file for each post. I still had to do some hand formatting here and there. I’ll also need to apply categories and tags. But, this was far simpler than manually editing each post.

This means I can cross a few things off my list:

• Styling / theming
• Migration of old posts
• Date formatting
• Pagination
• About page
• Coding block styling
• Navigation

I’m working on creating a new theme as I am not quite happy with the current colors. More specifically, I want a better set of light and dark themes. Also, I’m thinking about reformatting pages with multiple posts to display as cards.

While sharing some posts on LinkedIn, I noticed that the formatting could be better. In particular, I’m missing an Open Graph tag for pictures.

So, we’re adding a few more things to the list:

• Light / Dark themes
• Post excerpts as cards
• Open Graph tags for sharing