I’ve been blogging on and off for about five and a half years on three different platforms. I started off on Blogger and used their FTP publishing service to push files to my domain, but after I had about a thousand posts, either the service or my domain host was not able to make this a reliable method of posting. Movable Type was great because it seemed to be a “serious” blogging platform, but after a while, it simply wasn’t able to keep up with the comment spam. Hundreds of bots flooded the blog with links for all sorts of porn, prescription pills, and … is there any other kind of spam? WordPress made me very happy despite the rough edges because of the third party plugins like Akismet, and now WP-SpamFree.

Unfortunately, all of this blogging history leaves a lot of loose ends. I have hundreds of posts that link to articles and sites that no longer exist. I also have links to blog posts of mine that refer to the old Blogger or Movable Type filename. And I’ve got tons of posts where I quoted some article or site using an em instead of a blockquote, simply because I was going for a particular presentation rather than trying to convey meaning. This last bit ought to get me at least a year in geek purgatory.

Now that I’ve switched my hosting provider to Dreamhost (they’re awesome), updated WordPress to the latest release, completed the NaBloPoMo thing, and gotten involved in this Blogging Challenge with CJ, I have a renewed interest in my blog. I’ve updated the robots.txt, published a new XML sitemap and told Google about it, installed All-In-One SEO, and have been going over some logs and other things to figure out what’s broken and how to fix it.

As you can imagine, it’s a big pain in the ass.

At what point do you just say “Fuck it” and leave the 404s, stop trying to figure out what to put in the .htaccess file to redirect MT URLs to their most likely WP counterpart, stop categorizing the uncategorized posts, stop fixing the errors in text encoding that happened from backing up and restoring MySQL files, leave the blockquotes as ems, and stop worrying about whether your reader will be able to follow a link to a news article in 2003 on the Boston Globe site that talks about a fireworks accident in Florida?

Now’s probably a good time.