Looking back

As I undertake the now manageable and even pleasant task of bringing in old posts each day, a few things have struck me. One is how many links have simply rotted away. Where I can, I have updated those either by searching the site, if it remains, or The Internet Archive, although that too doesn't have absolutely everything. Along the way I am trying to ensure that my own posts, old and new, are archived.

Another is that some of the concerns I used to have are concerns I still have. I've never had much truck with organised religion, for example, especially when it pokes its nose into places where it has no authority, moral or otherwise. But I also have never been what I would call a militant atheist. All I really want is for the people who find religion gives them some sort of comfort in a difficult world to denounce those who use it as a shield and a sword.

Geolocation of photos used to be a worry, but is now effectively solved. Geolocation of myself is kinda, sorta solved, but it would be nice to make an effort to visualize the huge amounts of data I have gathered, at least on specific occasions. Wanderings does a pretty amazing job of gathering point source information, but not routes. I also keep meaning to write a very simple Shortcut that will record my current location to a file, which I think would be useful if I am on transport and see something I want to investigate further.

Of course I long have been and long will continue to be interested in food and agriculture, and that shows in a lot of my posts. Photography too, and gardening. Years ago I did a lot more brief linky posts, which now I guess I would put into my stream or one of the social media sites. I'm not doing nearly as much of that, mostly because there is just a bit too much friction to whacking off a quick post. That may well be a good thing.

All this rumination was prompted in part as a result of a typo in the date of an old post, which led to a discussion with Peter and Ton about surfacing older material. I don't want to publish a list of old stuff. But they each suggested some kind of index, in which I might curate some of the pieces I've written before that could have value now. That is a useful idea, and one I will pursue. It could be as “simple” as adding some kind of tag to posts deemed worthy, because my categories are far too general. That's something I might be able to do to each post going forward. Or it could be much more manual, building an actual hand-crafted guide to older posts.

Quite probably, neither will actually happen.