{"id":471,"date":"2011-01-25T14:27:27","date_gmt":"2011-01-25T20:27:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2011\/01\/25\/110125_historicalarchives\/"},"modified":"2022-03-19T13:05:57","modified_gmt":"2022-03-19T18:05:57","slug":"110125_historicalarchives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2011\/01\/25\/110125_historicalarchives\/","title":{"rendered":"Restoring the historical archives"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When I redesigned and &#8220;re-purposed&#8221; the Fire Ant Gazette in mid-2009, I deleted all posts dating back to inception &#8211; November, 2002. While I don&#8217;t remember the exact number of articles I&#8217;d posted during that seven year period, I think it was around 3,800, and I felt that most of them would not be missed.<\/p>\n<p>Lately, however, I&#8217;ve been feeling a bit nostalgic and have been selectively restoring some of those old posts. I wanted primarily to restore some of the book reviews I&#8217;ve done over the years (check the <a href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/category\/reading-writing\/\">Reading &amp; Writing<\/a> archive category to find those that I deemed worthy of re-introducing), but I also ran across some additional &#8220;notable&#8221; posts, including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>the <a title=\"And so it begins...\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2002\/11\/08\/021108_andsoitbegins\/\">very first Fire Ant Gazette post<\/a>;<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">the <a title=\"Think your job is tough?\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2002\/11\/18\/think-your-job-is-tough\/\">first post with actual content<\/a>;<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">a description of our <a title=\"Dancing Machines\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2005\/05\/10\/dancing-machines\/\">first ballroom dancing lesson<\/a>;<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\">the <a title=\"Book Review: 'Vanishing Point'\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2006\/07\/10\/060710_bookreviewvanishingpoint\/\">only post<\/a> that Debbie has ever contributed to the blog; and,<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: 1.25em;\"><a title=\"Farewell to a special pup\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2008\/11\/08\/081108_farewelltoabbye\/\">my farewell to Abbye<\/a> (which I think was harder to post this time around than two years ago; I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s because I&#8217;m still sick and\/or have allergens in my eyes).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My biggest regret is that I couldn&#8217;t import the many comments from readers that accompanied most of these posts (Abbye&#8217;s post had more than fifty, left by kind-hearted, sympathetic folks).<\/p>\n<p>This process has also been a reminder of why I started blogging in the first place, and the terrible mistake I made when I decided for reasons that are no longer clear to me (or sane, for that matter) that I was going to start over and do it in a format and in a style that didn&#8217;t encourage feedback. I forgot how much <b>fun<\/b> we had.<\/p>\n<p>I think the best days of the Gazette are gone and can&#8217;t be recovered. Too many things have changed in the way we use the web and social media, and I apparently no longer have the discipline &#8211; or, perhaps, the skill &#8211; to foment discussions like we had in &#8220;the good old days.&#8221; Eh, it is what it is, right?<\/p>\n<p>But, for whatever it&#8217;s worth, this exercise has rekindled an enthusiasm for the Gazette, and I hope that I can bring some increased energy to these virtual pages. Who knows? Maybe this Facebook fad will blow over and blogs will become the next big thing. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p><em>Update (2022): I&#8217;ve actually restored a really big portion of the &#8220;Lost Gazette Archives&#8221; when I had to rebuild the whole site after hackers took down the old version. It was a lot a work, but it also restored the original comments referenced above, most of which I treasure.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When I redesigned and &#8220;re-purposed&#8221; the Fire Ant Gazette in mid-2009, I deleted all posts dating back to inception &#8211; November, 2002. While I don&#8217;t remember the exact number of articles I&#8217;d posted during that seven year period, I think it was around 3,800, and I felt that most of them would not be missed.&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2011\/01\/25\/110125_historicalarchives\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Restoring the historical archives<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing","category-social-media","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9154,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions\/9154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}