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Saturday, December 12, 2009

Excercise In Self-Aggrandisement or In Futility?

E@L has been receiving a lot of hits to this blog coming from his old one. Any idea why? Maybe someone mentioned E@L in a post but used the old address, who knows. One supposes he could look up the hits stats to the old blog. Nah, that would involve remembering the old password!

E@L got a twinge of panic, thinking what would happen if it all went down! He therefore spent hours last night transferring some of his old blog posts to a Word file before the whole thing collapses - the credit card linked to his old host, Lunarpages.com, has expired, for example. Just in case, you know. There is backup they offer that gives you a MySQL database, but sorting that out into intelligible format? Fuggedabardit!

So instead he went through the old blost, post by post; Cmd A, Cmd C, Cmd V.

He supposes he could make a PDF of it all and sell it for a huge amount of money, or... give it away for free.

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Shit, he had only put in the first six months of posts (26 of 1,481 entries) and already the word-count is at over 20,000 and 58 pages, all from before he even started living in Singapore! Does E@L waffle on or WHAT! Some of what he thought were reasonable sized posts are filling 3-4 even 6 pages when the text is formatted to the default layout.

AND - those of you with long memories might recall that this is the THIRD incarnation of Expat-At-Large blog. He lost about 100 posts from prior to October of 2004 when his first host, Yahoo's Tripod kicked his arse off for uploading a photograph of the cover of a pirated DVD of "The Passion" - which said, incongruously, "Absolutely Hilarious." Most people thought the cover was absolutely hilarious.

He managed to rescue any posts that had comments from his email notifications.

Anyway, the point is there would have been a lot more from those first six months, but already it's a lot.

Then there was the time (TWICE!) that the old E@L website was hacked and used to send out phishing emails! Holy hell, the ride has not been easy. You cannot log onto E@L's old site from many locations (the Business Class lounge of BA in Heathrow for example) as the address is screened due to the phishing accident.

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Is this a worthwhile enterprise? Should E@L persist with the remainder of the 1,465 posts? At 20 per night this could going to take a long time - 2 years in fact. Perhaps he should just select a "Better Parts Of E@L" sort of thing. Technology stories, Restaurant Stories, The Mouse Stories, Taxi Driver stories, Disaster and Cooking stories, Bruce Stories... Ah fuck they're all good.

Or should E@L be doing something else?

Is this yet another a deflection?

E@L

19 comments:

Spike said...

I was hitting the old blog last night, but just a couple of pages, grabbing out your posts describing some of our mutual adventures.

I'd say grab everything while you can because you don't know what you will or will not want in the future.

I thought I had backed up the original Hongkie Town before deleting it - but it turns out I never got the last few months and that stuff never got archived by the Wayback Machine so it's gone forever.

And I deleted two years worth of the Ham Saap Lo blog without ever backing it up and that never got picked up by Wayback.

Memories, both good and bad, gone into thin air ... and at my age I need all the help I can get just to remember what I did last week!

expat@large said...

Ah, so it was you lurking in the archives!

Yes, I had some good stuff that was etherized by Tripod, and you had a terrific story going with your on/off relationship with T. Hope you got *that* historical record from the archives.

Memory; I used to know what that was.

I note that Izzy is occasionally posting on Sarongpartygirl. There must be a nostalgia bug going around.

Spike said...

There's the rub. I posted the overall summary in Hongkie Town but the real down & dirty details in Ham Saap Lo - and that stuff seems to be gone and irretrievable. Just need to make it up for the book.

Indiana said...

I recently went back looking for an old blog...and it to seems to have been stolen by cyber pirates...so I need to keep better back-ups as well.

What you could do is just accept that you are procrastinating and instead go for a beer?

Spike said...

BTW, please, someday, maybe this year, maybe next, update my listing in your blogroll?

expat@large said...

Spike: oh shit, that's right... Damn!

India: well I've got the MySQL backup and as I have the pmachine software on my computer (somewhere), I guess I could still could read the posts even if the site went down, just have to redirect the link to the local database.

Spike: done. New posts should appear when you write them.

savannah said...

good luck, sugar! xoxoxo

marke said...

Subbie it out. Good project for some kid

rambeaux said...

Get the mysql database and send it me dude!

rockstar69 said...

I can see just the kid right now!!!!!!

Lost in Melbourne said...

I think you are wasting time doing the cut and paste job. It would probably take you about a week of nights to work out how to extract the whole lot from the database and then it would be done.

expat@large said...

Rambeaux: I'll pop it in email as a gz file.

Rocky: who, what kid?

Scott: fer sure this is a task to subcontract out -- to Rambeaux...

rockstar69 said...

Expat: OK Remarkably talented young (maybe not so any more)man whose father is proud of him :-P


PS: Cricket my good man. Am I ballotting for the dining room on Sunday 27th or Monday 28th. If so, numbers!!!

Dick Headley said...

I will never forget when E@L finally switched to blogger. What a landmark day in blogging that was! A sigh of relief went round the blogosphere.

expat@large said...

DH: the crunch came when I couldn't bloody well Log In to the old myself!!

expat@large said...

DH: the crunch came when I couldn't bloody well Log In to the old myself!!

Dick Headley said...

That's what I thought you said.

knobby said...

dude, get the mysql version anyway. the "english" version is okay but you might always decide one fine day to export your old site to a new host and the easiest way would be to give the new fellers your mysql database, instead of doing the whole cmd-a, cmd-c etc routine all over again.

and someone or the other can always help you export individual posts from the mysql to plainenglish, i'm sure. heck that someone might even be theguyformerlyknownasknobby.

knobby said...

oh oops you already got your own help :)

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