If any of you are under the delusion that someday in the mid-to-long term future, a historian is going to stumble across your blog and say, “What brilliant insight into the beginning of the 21st Century so-and-so has,” I suggest grabbing your favorite comfort food or drink before heading over to Jib’s reality check. As for me, I’m under no such illusions. I know whatever little impact my words have will fade over time.
I do have to further address a portion of what Jib noted, specifically how easily links die. I’m as guilty as causing links to die as anybody else. The first several months, this place was on Blogger. I eventually moved off of Blogger, and originally cobbled together a redirect. Eventually, I used a different workaround that drives those that click on the No Runny Eggs link at my Blogger profile directly here, but that also killed the original norunnyeggs.blogspot.com address. Those posts are still here (the early archives), and also on Blogger’s server.
I was a lot better with the second move, from the norunnyeggs.eggstor.com domain to the norunnyeggs.com one. Because I maintained the eggstor.com domain, I could use a more-advanced redirect, and once I also moved the eggstor.com domain, I was able to finally have a seamless transition. Still, I had certain links that were broken, mainly pictures that were hotlinked to the norunnyeggs.eggstor.com.
Revisions/extensions (3:13 pm 1/17/2008) – I’ll repost a bit of a semi-revisit comment I left over at Jib’s place:
As for what is likely to be saved, I wouldn’t count on stand-alone “diaries” to make the macro-archive cut. That’s where the personal desire to archive comes in, just like it has with diarists through history.
I’m very torn on whether to include a further comment from Jib. It is very good; however, I do not want to steal the discussion.
It’s a damn lie! A lie, I tell you! They’ll love me! They MUST love me! I am a wrestling god! *Hard slap* Where am I?
It isn’t brilliance that a historian is necessarily going to be looking for. They are going to be looking at them for context and insight on the age we are living in. They’ll be used in ways similar to how a historian today might use a journal or letters from 100 or 200 years ago.
Very true, Jib. I’m on my own domain, and the rest of the family isn’t exactly into blogging, so I don’t believe this place will survive me. I do have an ability to move it to a somewhat-more-permanent place (actually, a pair of them); however, that runs into the same issue that you pointed out earlier, and it also presupposes that I would have time to copy my posts there.
Now, the question is do I try to burn out my printer making a hard copy of things here, which would be the most-likely way to archive a place like this? I do have something north of 1,500 posts, and several pages worth of polls. I also have a medium-capacity business-class black-and-white laser printer (the toner is supposedly good for 4,000 pages, and I do get 21 pages a minute out of this thing).
Then again, that’s too much navel-gazing for me.