Ask me ten years ago, and I'd say a blog entry, once published, should remain that way. Oh wait, I actually did say that:
I try never to delete anything substantive. Attempting to un-say something by deleting it is really just a case of hiding the evidence. I'd much rather correct myself out in the open than pretend I was never wrong in the first place.
The reasons not to delete come down to:
Not wanting to break the web by 404-ing a page
Wanting to be honest about what youâve said in public
Keeping a record of who you were at some moment in time.
The counter-arguments are:
The web was designed to break. And anyway, the stuff worth deleting is usually the stuff nobodyâs linking to.
Just how long does a mea culpa have to stand before it becomes self-indulgent?
Unless youâre noteworthy and dead, or celebrity and alive, the audience for your years-old personal diaries is particularly limited.
Publishing on the web isnât just something you do, and then have done. Itâs an ongoing process. A website isnât just a collection of pages, itâs a work that is both always complete, and always evolving. And every work can do with the occasional read-through with red pen in hand.
That last point is the most compelling one. I was publishing a website full of things that, however apt they were at the time to the audience they were published for, just arenât worth reading today.
So to cut a long story short, last weekend I un-published about 700 of the previously 1800 posts on this blog; things that were no longer correct, things that were no longer relevant, things that were no longer interesting even as moments in time, and things that I no longer feel comfortable being associated with. I don't think anything that was removed will be particularly missed, and as a whole the blog is a better experience for readers without them.
The weirdest thing about deleting 700 blog posts is realising you had 1800 to start with. Although to be fair, 1750 of them were Cure lyrics drunk-posted to Livejournal.
Under the hood
It's a testament to the resilience of Moveable Type that in the eleven years since I first installed it to run this blog, I've upgraded it exactly twice. If Iâd tried that with the competition, I doubt Iâd have had nearly as smooth a ride.
Moveable Type got me through multiple front-page appearances on Digg, reddit, Hacker News and Daring Fireball without a hitch, or at least would have if I hadn't turned out to be woefully incompetent at configuring Apache for the simple task of serving static files.
But as they say, all good things must come to end. Preferably with Q showing up in a time travel episode.
I replaced Moveable Type with a couple of scripts that publish a static site from a git repo, fully aware that Iâm doing this at least five years after it became trendy. The site should look mostly identical, except comments and trackbacks haven't been migrated. Theyâre in the repo, but I'm inclined to let them stay there.
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