This morning I was digging through my Evernote archive to find something I originally posted on gullicksonlaboratories.com about an old iOS project, DashApp .
A few years ago, when I decided to move off Wordpress I wrote a script that could import a Wordpress site into Evernote. The original idea was to then use a service called postach.io (the site is gone, but I found some repositories: https://github.com/postachio ) to publish the blog, straight out of Evernote, which sounded pretty sweet at the time. However it took postach.io too long to get things to a usable state and I decided to change course. That was probably around the time I started experimenting with what ultimately became preposter.us.
Anyway, I thought I had a nice archive of everything from gullicksonlaboratories.com in Evernote, but it seems like some things are missing. Furthermore, I don’t think I preserved the post dates correctly (at least it doesn’t look that way in the Evernote UI) and that’s a bit of a problem.
You see, even more years back I scoured the Internet Archive for my earliest “blog” posts (from a time before the word blog was really a word). I found many of these and carefully imported them into the Wordpress database and correctly back-dated them to their original post date. This made gullicksonlaboratories.com a single repository of almost everything I ever published on the web, which was pretty cool (and at times, embarrassing).
Eventually I’d like to get this content back on-line again, but if I torched the dates when pulling them in to Evernote, I’ll have to go back to the old Wordpress database again (assuming it still exists). The other problem with bringing that stuff back is where to do it. Preposter.us isn’t really designed to “fake” publishing dates; it could be done (I think), but it would be a lot of screwing around. In light of that, I might just come up with some kind of “museum” for this content, since anyone coming across it should be warned that it’s far from fresh.
All this makes me think about how we should approach our information legacy in a time where there will be an entire generation whose personal history is likely to exist in only electronic formats, and stored on systems they have no control over. The world today might be a very different place if we were not able to discover the unpublished writings and correspondence of our ancestors, and that is a very real possibility for the near future.
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// jjg