Eternal Sunshine Of A Spotless Blog

Hi, old friends and internet strangers. Me again.

Yes, this is another in the long-running "this time will be the time I successfully relaunch my blog!" series of posts, which I have written consistently every few years over the last quarter-decade.

This is my fourth CMS migration since its creation on February 27, 2000 - homegrown PHP "RemyNews" thing to Drupal (2002) to Movable Type (2003) to WordPress (2014), and now to Ghost. (We're ignoring the pre-blog era of this site; counting that, I am past 30 years with a personal website, which is terrifying.)

Did the site need a CMS change? Not really. But I'm approaching five years in my post-tech career pivot, and I was spending more time patching my blog than writing on it, and the tech stuff is getting less fun every day.

More and Faster (redux)

The motivation is relaunching the blog is usually "boy, these social media platforms are terrible for my content!" but eventually is sunk by "boy, I really am struggling to write anything". That may still end up being the case this go-round; when the day job is now communication, writing as a creative release is a tough ask.

But I have realized a lot of my creative energy has gradually shifted into Instagram. I still love photography to track what happened in my life. Monthly posts on my main account, and (since 2025) show posts on my wrestling hobby alt are my chance to reflect, to write some cryptic captions, to share what's going on. Even when the blog writing slowed way down, I have photo-blogged through it all.

And I'm deeply uneasy with the idea of those memories being locked to a platform that remains so deeply hostile to not just the web (try watching IG content without logging in) but simply getting content to the people who want to see it (the algorithm remains fickle).

That's fixable.

I've rebuilt a lot of Instagram content as part of this migration: my recent monthly photo posts, most of my recent travel, and even some of my wrestling shows. (In an effort to launch this thing, I will continue filling in the gaps in my blog memory with content I've already posted elsewhere post-go live.)

Less Is More

But even with that new content smell, the Ghost version of The Primary Vivid Weblog is entering the world with just short of 250 posts. At its peak, I had nearly 1,500 in the WordPress site. This is not a technical limitation but a personal call.

The vast majority of my blog posts were from the first five years - split between finishing college and early life post-graduation. I hit my 1,000th post in July 2005. Counting backwards the same length of time from today yielded just 19 posts.

Also, those pre-2006 archives were a mess:

• Nearly every post had broken links, after decades of the internet falling apart.
• At some point my Markdown formatting didn't import properly, and many posts didn't look right.
• There was a shocking amount of esoteric technical opinions and tutorials – PSP file structures, browser JavaScript benchmarks, explanations of setting up software I haven't touched in decades. Some of it carries sentimental value (the first Quicksilver tutorial), some of it might have some historical value (very rapid notes from the WWDC where Apple switched to Intel processors), but most of it is worthless.
• There is also an excessive amount of political commentary and rants that are not worth holding onto. My leftist politics haven't changed, but I don't need to revisit the daily mistakes of Iraq War through my archives.

It's a hard thing to say as someone who's been keeping a website going this long to supplement his memory: not all memories are worth keeping.

The migration originally imported everything, but 1000+ deletions was a lot on top of fixing the formatting and readability for the posts that survived. So that got flipped: I have instead read each post and hand-migrated the ones that felt important.

Those first five years were rapid daily life blogging, because there wasn't really any other way at scale to stay in touch with people. Web 2.0 social media killed the benefit of doing it in isolation, but it didn't end the need for a way to document the poignant moments of my life and the images from it.

So: here we go again. Hope you'll follow along once more.