Yak shaving, Revisiting Old Posts, and Link Rot

Recently, the owner of WordPress.com and the WordPress foundation went batshit insane. That deserves its own post, but the final result is that I decided to take the plunge and move this blog away from WordPress and into something else (Pelican or 11ty, I haven't made my mind yet).

Today, after spending way too much time updating all the things (something else that deserves its own post), I tried to use the WP export tool, just to realize that my blog has a lot of draft posts, and that would cause a lot of problems when migrating!

Why my blog has a lot of draft posts... eh, at some point I decided that I wanted to make sure that all published things were things I really felt comfortable saying, and I hid all the posts in this blog. Honestly, I don't quite remember the details.

So now I decided to go through the old posts and un-drafting them. I think I went through about 100 old posts today? The vast majority of them are just fine. Two of them I deleted because they were just a dead link, and only one of them was actually something too awkward that I decided did not need to see the light of day again.

And since I was going through these old posts, I decided to fix their tags and categories, because if we're going to shave that Yak, we might as well do a complete job, right?

Which brings me to the title of the blog -- so. many. dead. links. I think more than 2/3rds of the link in those old posts don't work anymore. It's really sad. The posts themselves were nice, most of them reminded me of good old days when I was finishing my PhD and starting a new job, but every now and then there was a "by the way, I saw this really cool thing on the internet today", and the cool thing was just a dead link now.

I started tagging those posts "link rot", but I almost named the tag "Ganondorf"...

Anyway, let's hope I finish the migration to a SSG soon!