I have been working on a boring but satisfying task, and it is a task that has been hanging over my head for SEVEN YEARS. I think it’s seven years. It’s not important enough to look up the exact dates. But it’s been hanging over my head since whenever it was that I moved this blog and the baby-name blog from a Blogspot blog-hosting platform to a WordPress one. There’s an import/export tool that let me move all the posts in a convenient swoop—but all the LINKS within those posts are still to the posts’ OLD location. So you could be HERE on WordPress, and then click a reference I made to an older post I wrote, and find yourself on the old Blogspot blog. I know this is very boring, but I’m almost done explaining it.
ALSO: any PHOTOS on the old blog didn’t actually move to WordPress but still actually lived over on Blogspot, using some system that lets the WordPress blog show the Blogspot photo as if through a little window. So if I were to delete an old Blogspot post, the photo would no longer be visible on the WordPress blog. But I NEEDED to delete the old Blogspot posts, because they are duplicate posts, and there is some issue online with duplicate posts: it looks scammy to search engines and workplace computers or something. And in any case it’s not tidy: it’s like having stuff still at your old house when you’ve already moved to your new house.
But it’s so tedious and time-consuming. Every photo (even the ones that are no longer very applicable, such as photos of things I bought on clearance at Target in 2008) has to be copied, then uploaded; then the post has to be edited to remove the old version of the photo and replace it with the new one. For every link, I have to figure out which post it links to, find the new version of that post on the new blog, copy the link to that post, and replace the old link with the new link. On the baby-name blog, every single time I did a “Name Update!” post, it has a link, and that link for all posts pre-move-to-Wordpress is wrong and has to be found and changed; every single photo of a cute baby has to be copied, uploaded, and replaced; every time I linked to an old post saying it was applicable to the situation in the current post, that link has to be found and replaced. And it’s easy to get distracted and find I’m just READING the old posts and forgetting to LOOK FOR LINKS AND PHOTOS.
I started working on this project long, long ago, right after I moved the blogs, and I did a couple of years’ worth of posts and then got distracted or busy or something. And once I’d stopped, it was much harder to restart: there’s a fair amount of effort involved in remembering what needs to be done for each post, and figuring out a good system of open windows/tabs for doing it, and getting into the rhythm of it. Plus, it’s pretty cringey to read my old posts. So when I started back up again, and did a couple more years’ worth, and then stalled out AGAIN—well, it has taken A VERY LONG TIME INDEED to get myself to go back to it. Every time I thought of it, my heart sank.
But what a perfect quarantine/summer project! As a quarantine project, it has gone the way of my entire list of Good Ideas For Quarantine Projects, which is to say I have not done a single one of them and that doesn’t show any signs of changing. But the kids’ remote-learning school year is coming near to an end, and we have been talking about how we’re going to handle Quarantine Summer, and one of the things we were discussing is if each of us (the kids and me) might like to choose A Summer Project. We are also considering doing our usual academic/creative/organizational concept, but A Summer Project would be good for those of us who want motivation to do something BIGGER.
For example, Elizabeth played trumpet for five years, and then a discouraging situation happened with the school’s music program and she stopped for a year, and now she would like to get back to it; that would be a GREAT Summer Project. Edward wants to learn a computer programming language that the high school doesn’t offer but that Paul and Rob both highly recommend he learn; that would be a GREAT Summer Project. And I would like to finally, finally, FINALLY get my entire new (“new”) blog location tidied up and the old blogs deleted; that would be a GREAT Summer Project.
I got a surge of motivation a few days ago to Get Started, and at first I thought, “No, no: I should wait until the school year is over and we are officially beginning our Summer Projects”—and then I thought ARE YOU NEW HERE OR SOMETHING? SEIZE THIS FLICKER OF MOTIVATION WHILE IT LASTS, and I got started. You should not notice much difference here. But if you have ever been back in the archives for something, and you’ve noticed the photos are all crammed up into the text weirdly, or if you’ve clicked a link and found yourself on a different-looking Swistle blog with a solid-blue background, that should soon be happening less often.
If I finish the project early, maybe I’ll go back to the earliest posts and take out all the double-spaces after sentences.
That is a terrific project! As a software developer (I’m a business analyst, but I used to be a coder), naturally I’m curious what language Edward wants to learn. Here in VA, they only teach Java, which is a great language, but not the best choice if he wants to go into, say, computer game development or animation.
Pico-8! And when I asked him, he clarified that it’s not actually a language but rather uses a language called Lua, and anyway I tuned out at that point.
My husband recently taught Lua to kids who were using Roblox to create games. It’s a good starter language.
I am Dreading Summer, which started yesterday. But I love all the projects you and the kids are working on!
I REALLY want my kids to get interested in a Summer Project! It’s only their first week of summer break, so I am trying not to nag them this week. But next week! We are having a conversation about this very thing. I also read this post last week that got me buzzing about it: https://www.thesimpledollar.com/financial-wellness/fun-expensive-challenges-from-hobbies
haha, looks like that url is incorrect, they’re INexpensive hobbies, not expensive ones!
Wow, this is such a good idea and somehow I had missed it in years past. Your Boring Behind-the-Scenes blog project would be one that I would find immensely satisfying too.
I have a similar project that I’m years behind on: I need to put the books I’ve reviewed into the author and title index. Should I have done this as I went along? Yes! Did I, for years, so that it became an oppressive chore? No! Maybe I’ll consider it as a Quarantine Project.
This took a slightly different turn than I was expecting. I was thinking you were going to ask one or several of your children to help with the blog conversion update. They probably aren’t interested and have their own projects to work on, but perhaps something like $0.50 per post would be some motivation and then you wouldn’t have to do it.
Regardless, your last line about the double spaces made me laugh out loud.
“But if you have ever been back in the archives for something”
LOL. I am back in your archives for everything (which sounds weird and kind of creepy but I’m not, I swear!). There have been so many of your posts that have meant something to me (drop IN the bucket has had the biggest impact) and I find your writing style so soothing and comforting in the “Yes, that is EXACTLY the way I feel too, only stated much more eloquently and with more consideration than I could do it” that I find even the posts that are not directly relevant to my life interesting and I always find something to make me smile.
Drop in the bucket, me too! Also the one about using the good things, and middle school dress codes (because it is SO funny). I’m with you, it’s a very soothing thing to do, searching Swistle Archives.
I too am a member of Self-Soothing with Swistle. Is it self-soothing if you’re using someone else’s writing?
Anyway, I am reliving the days gone by and the observations that still ring true. Which is to say all of them, except maybe nice things about Gymboree.
The world can pry my double spacing after sentences out of my cold, dead hands. That is all.
I have picked my guitar back up, which I have not consistently played since my early 20s. My fingers hurt and it has been incredibly satisfying. Now to keep it up as we slowly reopen.
I’m with you on the double-spacing!
As someone who rereads your old posts as a soothing mechanism when I can’t sleep, I appreciate the enormity of what you’re doing. Sometimes I worry that you’ll check search terms on your site and think I’m a creeper, but I literally just choose random nouns at 3:00am…
And I always always enjoy hearing what you have to say.
Gah! You just reminded me that I abandoned my “scan all of our photos” project a year or so ago. Maybe that should be my project…
If you want to leave the old blog up and not get hit with the search engine spammy duplicate issue, you should be able to “no index” the old site, which will stop it from showing up in search and solve the problem. (I work in SEO. Fun fact: the google update that started the duplicates issue was called Panda. Why do they make it so cute?? Ruined several months of my work life.)
HA ha I am SO familiar with that “seize that flicker of motivation, fool!” moment. I haven’t had even a flicker for quite a while now, and what I do have is all used on the tiny amount of work I do for school every week.
My kids FINALLY went back to school this week (in South Korea, and only the 3 youngest, and only for 2 weeks til summer break starts) so it is feeling less like Quarantine and more like normal life but summer is looming and there are still so many things we won’t be able/I will not be comfortable doing so I think the Summer Project idea is genius. A few summers ago I tried to get my oldest to do a typing program so he could get away from hunt-and-peck but he had zero interest. We signed them all up for swimming lessons mostly as a way to get them some pool time while the beaches are still technically closed, but I still need them interested in SOMETHING other than begging for game time and arguging over toys.
And you really threw me with the single spacing after a sentence thing. I am still stuck on pre-2000 MLA format and that will never change.
Oooh, I have been meaning to fix broken links from when I moved from blogspot to wordpress, back in 2014. MAYBE I SHOULD GET ON THAT. Then again, who is looking at my archives? I have to wait for the mood to strike, I guess.
We moved my blog from one platform to another in 2011 and lost all the photos. Whenever I link back to an old post, I have B restore the photos, but I dream of having them all back sometimes. We also lost all the comments from 2007 and most of 2008 in another incident and it still gets my goat.
My old blog is a lost cause (I’ll link it today in case anyone is interested, but it hasn’t been updated in years – the last time I meaningfully wrote was in 2011), but what I do want to do is download/copy all the old entries into a Word file, format it, make it into a pdf, and give my kids copies. Maybe this is the time to tackle that sort of thing? Even better, maybe this summer is the time to pay my kids to do all the copy-pasting since they’re stuck at home anyway!
What I’ve been toying with is starting a new blog. I’m trying to decide on whether to write it as me, or whether to make it more anonymous like Swistle. I think it will depend if I want to use it to showcase my photography – in which case I’d need to use my real name since my business is Shawna Cameron Photography – or just write musings.
Ditto with the readers who refer back to the drop in the bucket and the use the good things posts! I also think a lot about the Startling Expenses post:
https://www.swistle.com/2012/07/17/startling-expenses/
I actually came back to this post just to thank you because you totally inspired me to tackle something I HATE doing and avoid at all costs: backing up the photos on my phone. There were thousands on there (15k!) and now they’re safely duplicated on two external hard drives. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
(For the record, I love the grocery store stock updates. I haven’t been in a store since March and I find it so fascinating to hear what’s available! It’s valuable news!)
Yes! Startling expenses + all things perfume have been on my mind as I spend my shelter-in-place days buying and trying samples, looking for something I will love as much as I loved my perfume from the 80s, now discontinued. If anyone would like a fistful of testers with vanilla notes, let me know.
My tedious task of choice these days is gardening/yardwork. I hate gardening, but I hate the way the yard looks when I don’t. And my husband said he would help if I assigned him tasks, but that took us down the My Way/the Right Way rabbit hole, so now I toil alone and he compliments my efforts.
My summer/quarantine project (I’m in Scotland, we are barely even considering peeking our heads out of quarantine) is learning to play ukulele. My wife is a music teacher and owns a few ukuleles and now that she’s taught me enough to play various chords, we are having fun music jam sessions in the back garden. She plays only as an accompaniment to her own singing, so now I’m starting to look stuff up about finger picking and how to do some other cool stuff with it.
I’ve been using shutterfly since 2006 for photos. The first 5 years, I did a terrible job of naming things and cannot find older photos because the folders lack dates (instead of 2009-07-03 description, I used helpful things like roadtrip to grandmas….except we did that more than once and a date would have helped). Inspired by your”boring but necessary” project, I started doing the same this weekend. It was time consuming and the website kept freezing up, but I made serious progress! I feel so amazing! Thanks for the inspiration!
Speaking of “boring but necessary”, I went back to tackling taxes yesterday (our deadline was extended here, plus you can technically file late without a problem if you’re expecting a refund, which I am), but was thwarted because last week my credit card was compromised by an online purchase. And I hadn’t realized when they were cancelling it that that would mean I wouldn’t have access to my electronic statements until I got a new card to access my account. And since I run a small side business, and a lot of my business expenses are paid online by credit card in $USD, I need my statements to tell me exactly how much money I’ve spent in $CAD. Frustrating!
Oh and at some point I’ve got to get around to organizing and backing up my design assets. I have over 1500 fonts alone!