Last Call for Old Posts

dispatches
#site-meta

After migrating sites, it's time to send old posts off into the sunset.

"A dark-coloured cat sits in silhouette on sunlit stone paving, casting a distinct shadow, while looking towards the right; the cat is positioned near a weathered stone wall or raised edge on the left side of the frame, with bright sunlight creating strong contrast and highlighting the textured surface of the aged stone pavement."

When I moved this site over from WordPress earlier this year, one of the things that I was struggling with was what to do with the historic content of this blog. Let me explain for new readers: Prior to moving to Minnesota in 2022, I was rather involved in downtown Phoenix advocacy issues, and wrote nauseatingly extensively about it in the early part of the 2010s. But the matter now is this: I’m no longer living in Phoenix, and downtown Phoenix advocacy isn’t the focus of my writing, as I’m looking more at the intersection of nonprofit organizations and information technology.

From a technical perspective, how old posts have worked is that I have had Cloudflare Pages automatically redirect 404 (aka Page Not Found) URLs on this new site to the previous version of the site, which is living at old.edwardjensen.net. I’m going to work on spinning up a better 404 infrastructure on this site, and encourage searching for posts on that page. This is my homework!

There were two options I had. The first was to migrate everything over, but that would be a laborious process. Sure, I could script a lot of it, but it would still take a lot of hand-holding. I looked again at a lot of these early posts, and while I stand by what I wrote as something I believed at that time, or that post was relevant to that time and place, many of the posts just aren’t relevant any longer. They were either for a specific thing or to capture a snapshot of time.

Which leads to the second option, and what I’m going to do: I’m going to migrate over a few posts that are exemplars of what I’ve worked on, or are still germane to this new chapter, and then gracefully sunset the remainder. I’ll take a snapshot of the old site before it goes off to its retirement, of course, and keep the posts on some sort of personal archive for my personal portfolio. But for public consumption, what’s done is done, and I think we can move along from them.

So…last call to see old and only mildly cringeworthy posts from a much younger Eddie! They’ll be going away in early November, after I’ve determined what to bring forward and how to present it. In addition to looking at metrics for what posts still get a lot of views (weirdly, this post from 2013 on a Dell Latitude XT2 still gets 10-15 views a week, despite everything on that post being horribly outdated), let me know on LinkedIn or Bluesky if there are specific posts you want me to keep online.