While sitting here in the dark of the junk room, bathed in the light of lamps that stand on either end of the desk, a server farm somewhere is having a quiet heart attack - having received every blog post I’ve written since 2003. The posts are slowly appearing - back-filling the past towards the present, re-constructing the “story of me”.
You’re probably wondering why. So am I.
The entire escapade was triggered by a conversation with a friend earlier - who mentioned they had been reading my blog recently. All of the over-think cogs started turning at once following the conversation, and I began wondering how I might bring “the motherlode” to life on the internet once more.
I’m nothing if not organised.
Hidden away on the internet, I’ve always had a backup of my blog in various states of disrepair, hidden away in a source code repository, stored as “markdown” (a plain text format used in the publishing industry).
After a few minutes of head scratching, and some re-purposing of old python scripts, I turned the collection of plain text files into Wordpress import files. Substack understands wordpress import files.
And so - as I write this, the Substack server farm is churning through somewhere in the region of six thousand posts - expanding the stories told here to include twenty years worth of traveling with work, running, IVF, adoption, parenting, cats, dogs, and everything in-between.
I’m not sure anybody would be mad enough to go back and read the whole damn thing, but you never know. Some of the older posts are bit broken in places - the result of one too many migrations between platforms in the early days of the social internet - but the words are all there. Or at least, mostly there.
Anyway.
I’ll shut up. It’s been a bit of a day. The project I’ve been working on involves a lot of mathematics - lots of angles, distances, and coordinates. Triganometry. I’m not quite sure how I remembered it, but I did - and the math miraculously worked - conjuring business graphics onto the screen more-or-less where I planned it to. I joked with a friend that I almost did a happy dance through the house.
We won’t talk about the next project coming down the pipe - which will apparently keep me busy until next year and beyond. Fun times.