I had an old website for several years. I talked about it here a little bit already but for a little more context I used it up until around 2009 or so and then it hung around for another year or so before it was repeatedly hacked and I took it offline. I eventually let the domain name expire. It was quickly snapped up by someone and put to use as an international adult site. The internet does what the internet does I guess.

Just recently though I was able to reacquire it. I was able to put it out to pasture just serving a 301 redirect to its own archive. There’s some more information about it here:

For a while it bugged me that it was such a simple site yet it had become such a hassle to maintain which is kind of what lead me to stop using it. I was also super busy at the time with my actual job and the software package I’d chosen to use to host had basically been abandoned by its maintainer, so when I finally shut it down it was meant to be.

I’d kind of held on to the idea of bringing it back online. I had backups of it, I had the database. I even had all of the images The problem really was that things had progressed a lot over the last 15 years or so. Publishing 640px x 640px medium quality jpgs was great in 2005 when most people had DSL and smartphones weren’t a thing. In the 2020s that site wouldn’t present too well.

This became another potential project to come out of scanning my film archive. I wasn’t actually even too worried about it because I knew how all of the pieces worked. I also knew that it was going to involve a ton of manual work. The kind of manual work that would leave you with a numb hand from simply using the track pad for too long of a time trying to sift through thousands of images to find the correct ones.

To do this is I needed to rebuild each of the ~300 posts from this old site manually, well… somewhat manually. I’d spent a good deal of time figuring out the capabilities of WordPress when I was building this new site. Once I had that piece sorted out I was able to spend about an hour putting together a database script that imported the right pieces of the old site into the new site’s database and then in about 10 seconds I had every post from my old site available in my new site.

Seems simple! And it mostly is. The hard part was identifying all of the old images in my photo catalog and getting them into the posts I’d created in the new site.

The way I did this was pretty rote and I probably did the entire thing over the course of a week or so. This is in 15 – 60 minute periods of time, for however long I had, or however long I could stand it.

I had a folder of every old low-res image along with its original file name and I was familiar enough with the pictures that I could identify most of them. So I just started going through my new image catalog of freshly scanned pictures, when I found an image that looked familiar I’d go look through the original image folder. When I had a hit I’d assign the original filename to the new image as a tag, check it off the list and keep going.

After a few days I had identified every image, I’d manually recreated a few composite images that I’d made originally, and I had a smart album in Lightroom of every picture needed for the site. A single large export from Lightroom, upload to WordPress, another rote exercise assigning each image to its respective post in WordPress, and I had my old site back up with much better looking scans of every image than I’d had originally.

I spent another couple of evenings going through each post manually to check it and assign tags in wordpress for some alternate navigation options. After that I made a WordPress template for those posts that mostly resembled what my old site looked like. And there it was, my old site preserved in a cleaner form mostly for the sake of nostalgia. I like it though, it was a lot of work, a lot of learning, and a lot of photography.

I’m not really sure how it holds up today but that doesn’t matter. Photoblogs in the pre-youtube, early-flickr, post-film-early-digital mid-aughts were the best, you just had to be there.