How I make my blog posts more resilient

Hello again. It's your boy Mike here, blogging about blogging (glances at Wouter (opens in a new tab)). Today, I'd like to explore the topic of making my blog posts more durable.

I recently completed importing a backup of some of my old blog posts. These posts were from 2012 - 2019 and required a fair bit of editing because I was using embeds from other sites, some of which have since been purchased and shut down.

Here are my lessons learned, focusing on my posts only and not the hosting problem of keeping a site online for a long time after I've shuffled off this mortal coil.

1. Self-host media #

In these old posts, I often hosted my images on Flickr and linked to them. If my the Flickr account is closed, or they're sold to someone else, then there goes my images!

Plus, hosting images and video myself is more in the spirit of IndieWeb POSSE (opens in a new tab) too.

I now host my own images and videos on this site locally, and then I syndicate them to the other platforms as needed.

2. Avoid third-party iframe embeds for important content #

Many of my old posts were hiking and biking trip reports. As a stats nerd, I enjoy seeing the details about where I hiked/biked, how long and how much elevation there was on a trip. I was mostly just grabbing the little share widget from Strava and EveryTrail and plopping it onto the page. This is a third-party dependency that can cause the content to become unavailable. If Strava ever closed my account, or I deleted it, my content is gone. EveryTrail shut down like ten years ago, so those embeds were already dead.

Going forward, I will screenshot or copy these stats and post them. Then no matter what happens to the third-party site, I don't lose my maps and stats!

3. Keep URLs stable and never change them #

Decide on a slugify formula and stick with it.

URIs don't change: people change them.

Tim Berners-Lee, Cool URIs don't change (opens in a new tab) (1998)

When I publish a post, I set the permalink value in frontmatter and it never moves again. Even if I want to update my slugify formula later, all the old posts stay and only the new posts receive the new formula for their permalinks.

4. Normalize tags on the way in #

Tag pages have URLs too, so everything in the section above applies to them.

I split my own archive without noticing. I'd been tagging posts SmartHome sometimes and HomeAutomation other times, same idea, two tags, so posts about the same thing ended up on two different pages and neither page had the whole story. I settled on HomeAutomation and redirected the other one, but now I'm carrying those redirects forever.

Now I normalize on the way in instead of cleaning up later: no spaces, CamelCase for compounds, acronyms keep their own casing. It's a small rule and it only works if I follow it every time.

Conclusion #

In short, the parts of my old archived posts that survived 14 years were the ones I owned and kept simple; the parts that broke were the ones I outsourced to someone else's server.