Everything Out of the Old Box

Two weeks ago a drive nearly took a whole trip with it. I have written about the clicking. What I did not write is that I sat on the kitchen floor afterwards and understood, with the clarity that only arrives at three in the morning, that the blog was standing in exactly the same place: one account, one host, one password, and a backup I had been paying extra for and had never once tested.

So, the move. It took nine days, and I would like to put down what it actually involved, because every account of this I read beforehand was written by somebody selling something.

The export is a single XML file and it does not contain the pictures. That is the part nobody says first. You get the text of every post and a list of addresses where the images used to live, and then you fetch them yourself out of a folder tree organised by year and month, over a connection that gives up roughly every fourth file. Each photograph is also sitting there five times over, in sizes I never asked anyone for, and working out which of the five was the one I originally uploaded took longer than the downloading did.

The oldest entries came back with their Cyrillic turned into rows of question marks, a character-set argument between the old database and everything since, and I repaired those by hand with the shortwave on for company, the window over the table iced on the inside, the courtyard lamp reaching about as far as the bins. Shortcodes I had forgotten existed arrived as literal text in square brackets. The addresses of the posts changed shape, so there is now a list of redirects longer than some of the posts it redirects to.

I kept every original date. I want to say that plainly, because a person could reasonably ask why an archive that starts years ago sits at an address a few months old. The answer is dull. The writing is old, the address is new, and the dates travelled across in the export because that is what an export is for. A handful of the oldest entries arrived without their pictures and I have left them that way rather than invent replacements.

There was also a checkbox. Somewhere near the beginning I had ticked the option that politely asks search engines to stay away, because I was writing for eleven people and the thought of being found made me want to shut the laptop. It stayed ticked for four years. I unticked it on the last evening and felt considerably more exposed than the photographs have ever made me feel.

No content management system this time. Files I write, pages I build, a folder I can copy to a second drive with one command. If it breaks now it will be because I broke it, which is a category of failure I can live with and, on the evidence of the last nine days, actively prefer.