I didn't mean to disappear for the rest of the summer, but it took me a lot longer than I thought it would to sort out the spam-infested disaster this blog had become. Rash decisions were made, all files on the domain were deleted, and then, frantically and inefficiently over the next two months, recovered. Let's summarize.
Housekeeping
Every entry from the start of this blog in May 2006 to July 2010 has been restored without editing. I was tempted, believe me, to scrap huge portions and clear the internet of various times in my life, but that feels disingenuous and it's important to me to remember my life as I was experiencing it, not just as I remember it now.
That said, there are likely some glitches for the archived entries, such as:
- Formatting issues. Even if I saw them, I didn't fix them. The text and images should be intact, but there were 616 entries to process and I didn't have access to the HTML files. Formatting should be appropriate moving forward.
- Self-referencing links. They won't work. The page nomenclature in Movable Type is different, and I have not adjusted the links (not sure I plan to either).
-
Files hosted on the server. Largely gone. Fortunately, I don't think there were too many of those, just a sound clip here or there since I was almost exclusively using
Flickr by the time I started this blog. If there is something you're particularly missing, please do drop me a line and I'll see if I can dig it up.
- Comments. They are all gone. I'm pretty sad about this point because there were some lovely and insightful things said by friends, family, and internet acquaintances on here. In some cases, the comments were the only contact information I even had for people. There's nothing I can do, though, except encourage you to comment moving forward, and I'll try not to be so negligent in future.
- Categories. Also gone. I will be using tags and categories moving forward, but these will not include the first 4+ years of the blog unless I get up an OCD head of steam one day.
BUT!
- I encourage you to use the Search function, as it does seem to be very good, fast, and returns full results.
RSS Feed
If you have been subscribing to my blog through a feed aggregator, I do believe you will need to update your RSS Feed. I am pretty sure this is the new link: Subscribe to Vickilicious.com.
If you're using Google Reader (which as I understand it, is one of your only options now that Bloglines is going down, and which I also can't recommend enough), you can click "Add a Subscription" and type "vickilicious.com." It will probably then show up with 15 to 617 unread entries, depending on your settings, in which case I suggest you make use of the "Mark all as read" function.
Design
The new design of this site has some good things about it and some that are less than ideal. I miss the minimal feel of my former layout, but this one is not bad. I think I'd actually quite like it if the shades of blue were green and I could figure out how to lead with a header image. I am reluctant (and ill-equipped) to go poking around in the CSS files, since I think that is how I introduced so many of the security compromises that brought this site down before, but perhaps in time I will read and learn enough to get brave and do it correctly.
I've decided, for the time being, to leave my
Twitter stream off the front page (another suspect for security breaches). I actually liked having it there because I know that not everyone who reads this blog uses Twitter, but I think the majority of blog readers are reading in an aggregator anyway, so it's not worth having problematic code. If you really miss my Tweets, you can
subscribe to my timeline in your favorite RSS feed aggregator.
I do plan to add "About Me," "About this Site" and "Links" pages again, but I lost all my links and pages, so I have to rewrite them.
I would also like to truncate the Archives or adjust them to a drop-down menu or calendar format, as they take up a lot of sidebar real estate with little clear benefit besides showing the wave-like shape of the months when written out over years.
I haven't decided if I will adjust the default format of the site to show one entry on the front page (with Previous and Next links as I used to have) or to keep a few at a time before referring you to archives. I think that will depend on frequency and length of posting and how that impacts page-load speed. My inclination is to return to one post at a time, since I'm a talker and I like my photos.
Moving Forward
The timing of this blog sea-change, as it were, is actually quite apt, since I've been making massive changes in my personal life and thinking behind the scenes here.
I plan to write a post that summarizes all these changes in the next few days.
I'm glad to return to blogging because I've really missed it. Not having access to this blog for the time that I did has made me think about the pleasure and utility in reflection and writing. Across the board, my life is a bit of a "fresh start" right now, so it's fitting that my blog comes along on that path. I'm really looking forward to it.
