The internet is not forever.
Today I recived notice from Wordpress that my Radula Archives (First Decade) was over limit on media storage. I haven't added to that account in years, so it must be that they've changed the limit, and not grandfathered me in. When I went to that blog, I found that many of the blogs had their photos scrambled and mixed up: Photos of the Science Center in L.A., for example, had photos of the Dalai Lama, political cartoons, and El Rancho de las Golondrinas.
Apparently they will delete photos if I don't reduce my storage size.
I've tried to download the site, but it isn't downloading into the correct format. I can't break it up into different Blogger accounts, which was my hope. Instead, I've been able to download all the photos (I hope) and will hand pick posts (out of literal thousands) to print and keep hard copy. It's going to take significant time.
As I look through my photos, I am perplexed at why so many posts are scrambled, when the media linked to the individual posts are in the media files. What this all means to me is that it's really REALLY important to be keeping hard copies of everything that is truly meaningful, because it's going to get lost.
Maybe my memories aren't that important. Maybe with blogging being dead, none of this matters, because once I'm gone, no one is even going to look back on these days. I don't know. I do know that my life is a series of experiences, and that any message I have to the world with my passing would be a sum total of those memories: That each day, each experience is an opportunity to grow, find joy, or better the world. Sometimes all three at once.
One of the first things I found when going through the photos recovered was this map:
This actually was moved from Blogger to Wordpress when I archived my first decade to make room for more media here. Somewhere (I hope) there still exists the key to this map. I do know that each of those icons represents some place I wanted to see. I know the aliens were weird roadside attractions: Nebraska was Carhenge. I know that the guys with hats aren't cowboys in this map, but National Park Rangers. The rest? I'm just not sure. I do know that I made this map back when the kids were quite young, likely when I was living in Florida. The idea was to drive a figure 8 around the country to see all those locations with the twins. I still haven't completely given up on that, and I'd love to find the post (if it still exists anywhere) with the key to this map and the links to the information on the locations.
I'm sure I'll find other things as I go through this process of trying to rescue some of my memories. I don't know how many I will end up saving. Certainly I want to save all the "From the Back Seat of the Suburban Mom-mobile" posts, but I'm increasingly worried that those will be lost to the crumbling chaos that free Wordpress has become.
Comments
Post a Comment