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?
8 thoughts on “Necroposting - blogging from before you started blogging”
@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 to original comment on social.tchncs.de
@Edent see, when you said necroposting I imagined a terrible future where an AI just takes over your posting when you die.
| Reply to original comment on mastodon.me.uk
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 to original comment on twitter.com
@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 to original comment on mastodon.social
@jonhicks @Edent I mean, they ought to be called "anteposts", but I fear this is not as funny as I think it is 🙂
| Reply to original comment on mastodon.social
Uma boa ideia. Pensando em fazer isso no meu blog TB.
| Reply to original comment on twitter.com
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[…] Eden struck a minor chord this week with his “necroposts” announcement, not to be confused with necroposting as posting to a long-dead, inactive thread. (Eden’s own […]
[…] 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 […]
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