Blog 

If you're reading this that means I have gone through the effort of resurrecting my personal blog\website (originally hosted here), it seems I am undecided between giving up and using either GitHub or GitLab to host a static version of my website (or blog), or paying the $10 a month for hosting, in the end I think I have just decided to do both.

If you're reading this post on GitHub or GitLab, my new website URL is https://deviousmalcontent.net/, so you'll have to update your bookmarks! :-)

The following is a postmortem, following my somewhat successful attempt to archive this site, and this would also be the third time that this site has moved within its lifetime...

Other noticeable changes are this website is now decoupled from its index (originally found here), a somewhat inane attempt to make a professional website but that has since moved to here.

Mistakes I made archiving my site.

1. Using imgur to host images.

This made sense back in the day, SourceForge developer web bandwidth was fairly limited meaning that any more than a few images on a page, and it would become a slugfest for loading, to compensate for this, I used imgur to host images, this wasn't an issue at the start, but as time progressed, and policies changed, it would no longer hotlink directly to an image file, but instead take you to the imgur images page, this was, from my perspective unintended behaviour, but I'd imagine the change to do this was to bring more traffic to the website.

The drawback to this was that when I used the wayback machine to archive my website, it wasn't up until the very last day that I notice that images hadn't been backed up on certain articles. - it's an easy fix in hindsight as I discovered a way to easily download all of my imgur images, and had I realised beforehand, it would have been a simple fix to pull all the images down and rehost them on the website for the purposes of archiving, regardless of the page load times as then rehosting them on the Internet archive the bandwidth would have been sufficient. - That leads me on to mistake #2.

2. I didn't test my archives.

As pages were being saved, I didn't take the time to go check the quality for the items that were being saved.

To compensate for this I have created a zip file of all of my previous blog articles ripped, with images, (that archive is available here) this was actually done as my backup plan, as originally using the Internet archive had issues with Cloudflare not allowing my site to be scraped by the Internet archive, but I did get some help with this from the SourceForge admins, I'm glad I got someone who understood and cared about preservation.

Things I've done.

I've converted my blog posts over from the proprietary weird XML format that I was using too simple markdown, this gives me the advantage of easy editing, the drawback is limited tags but keeps the articles in scope, as in, I can't do clever or random things with HTML, and that makes things a little bit more accessible cross platform.

I've decided to cross host my blog because I want to have a little bit of redundancy, should my website ever, one day, simply disappear...

Moving forward with it, I am now in the process of adding a few new quality of life improvements such as the removal of deprecated HTML elements, and much cleaner CSS styling.

Here's to the future!