Last Updated on: 9th July 2018, 12:57 pm
Last Tuesday, I started changing old posts so they had a proper title. Now, finally, *collapses in a heap*, they’re done! Well, they were done yesterday morning, but this is the first time I had a chance to post about it. Every single blog post has its title field filled in!
Here’s a quick and probably boring history lesson. When this place started, for some unknown reason, Steve and Matt chose not to have title fields. Maybe the option wasn’t available. I don’t know, I wasn’t around. I was just hurling random things at Steve to post on my behalf and trying to help with html. So, Steve and Matt would just make their own titles. The first line of the post would be made to look bigger and like a title, but it wasn’t an actual title field. Then, when we realized how they worked and decided that title fields were good, we were worried that if we turned them on, it would screw up all the previous posts that didn’t have titles. When we decided to turn them on in January of 2007, we saw that nothing went bad with the old posts, they just continued to have no titles. We thought the new titles looked cool, and wondered about giving all the old posts titles. But then we were worried that if we changed the titles, it would change all the posts’ permalinks, and that would suck. Plus, we knew sitting there and manually entering titles on each post from October of 2003 to January of 2007 would be a long job, and didn’t want to do that if it would gork something else in the process.
Time ticked by, until the other day, Steve posted something, gave it a title, changed the title and saw that the link didnt’ change! This was a revelation, and I decided that now we knew we could fix the whole blog so it looked the same, so off I went. It took 6 goddamn days and an evening, but it’s done!
Plus, I fixed all the raw code that was showing from July to October of 2004 when the posting system’s interface changed and started gorking html. So some of those posts won’t make as much sense as they used to. That was a hard balance. I had to take out chunks of some posts that said that you had to paste the link into your browser because well, you don’t. But at the same time I didn’t want to take out too much of the post.
Allow me to continue geeking just a little bit longer. Please don’t fall asleep. Here’s something annoying that I found out while doing this. Blogger, unlike everyone else in the known universe, does not allow you to go to a specific page of posts. When you’re showing the most recent page, all you have as far as options are “older”, which would be the next most recent page, and “oldest”, which is the least recent page. When you have a blog that has nearly 2700 posts, that leaves a big gap in between. The most possible options you get are “newest”, “newer”, “older”, and “oldest.” That still leaves a lot of room in between, even when I set the number of posts per page to 300, which is the maximum. and when each page seems to take forever to load, the process takes way longer than it should. I was starting to grumble that I was spending more time drumming my fingers waiting for pages to load than I was making edits.
So, *ding*, a light turned on in my head. What if I looked at the URL for a shortcut. And, lo and behold, there was one. The basic URL that shows when you’re editing a page of posts is “http://www.blogger.com/posts.g?blogID=xxx&searchType=ALL”. Now, xxx is your actual blog ID. That is the URL that shows up when you’re looking at your most recent page of posts. As you go older, the word &page=” is added to the end and then a number. Here’s a bit of weirdness. For the second most recent page, the page number is 1, and they go up from there. Ok, geeking over.
It was really weird to do this job. Because I’m strange and remember things in odd ways, when I look at a given blog post, I remember more than the post itself. It brings back memories of the circumstances around it. I remember how I felt when it was written, even if I didn’t write the post. So, editing all these posts made me feel like my life was in fast-forward mode. I basically sped through 3 years of my life in six days. Wow, I’ve gone from geek to loser. I have to stop myself.
It’s weird watching the blog evolve. There were the early days when Steve and Matt were trying to make links work and figuring out basic stuff. There was the first comment board which turned out to be a piece of shit. And oh there was all the fun that happened on that board that will be lost forever. But the one thing that never changed was the huge pile of weirdos that Steve and Matt always could find. As I made titles, I had to laugh about Matt getting told that he couldn’t slide in hiking boots, silly, or getting spanked by an old man at a game. Matt, you know how to find the weirdos. Reading about Steve’s ordeal with some long-lost treasures that had turned to trash in the fridge made me giggle a lot. As for looking at my own posts…yuck. It’s kind of like hearing your own voice on tape. It doesn’t sound like you hoped it would and has a lot of ugliness and squeaking in it. That wasn’t true of all of the posts, but I could definitely say that for some. Who knew a bunch of tedious work could make me get all nostalgic? That was one thing I kept thinking as I did this. At least the material I’m working with isn’t boring.
But of course, as every post involving site changes has to end, I have to say this. In all my fixing, I may have broken something. So if you decide to travel down memory lane and see any broken posts, let me know and I’ll fix them.
Enjoy the new look, although it’s probably not much different than the old one.
