Necroposting - blogging from before you started blogging


Jon Hicks has a lovely blog post about his site's design. In it, he briefly touches on something I find interesting:

Blogging like it's 1972
I also finally realised that there's nothing stopping me from adding journal posts dated from before I started blogging. So I'm going to start adding key life moments as much as I can.

A blog isn't an immutable chain of events. There's nothing to stop us travelling in time. When I go digital sperlunking though my history, I often find interesting things I wrote before I blogged. So I bring these "back from the dead" and publish them as Necroposts.

It's pretty simple. I copy and paste the text, set the published date to be in the past and - presto chango - history is rewritten.

My oldest necropost so far is from 1987. I found an old diary entry I'd typed up on our BBC Micro - and now it's on the web. I've found old photos and letters to video game magazines. There are some old USENET postings and things I wrote for old university magazines. Yesterday, I published a post I'd written which had been deleted by my former employer.

I'm hoping that, one day, I'll find all the 5¼ floppy disks I had as a kid so I can treat you to the terrible song lyrics and abysmal BASIC code I wrote back then. Won't that be a lovely treat for you all?


Share this post on…

8 thoughts on “Necroposting - blogging from before you started blogging”

  1. says:

    @Edent been there, done that 😛

    …especially because I had no CMS before 2004 and I also had to syndicate some old posts back from silos that no longer exist.

    Reply
  2. I always liked manipulating Date Taken on flickr when posting scanned images from before the site (or sometimes the internet) existed, but this takes a bit further. It's good that the metadata supports it.


    Reply
  3. says:

    @Edent I still can't get behind the phrase ‘Necroposts’ though. Too much like I've already died and blogging from the beyond. Did you ‘workshop’ any alternatives?

    Reply

Trackbacks and Pingbacks

  1. […] post is prompted by Terence Eden‘s post Necroposting – blogging from before you started blogging – Terence Eden’s Blog I’m eventually going to change the posting date to the one you see right at the […]

What links here from around this blog?

What are your reckons?

All comments are moderated and may not be published immediately. Your email address will not be published.Allowed HTML: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong> <pre> <p> <br> <img src="" alt="" title="" srcset="">