“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
So what I discovered, in painstakingly cleaning and correcting nearly five hundred fifty pages of link spam and weird line breaks, is a lot of link rot, a lot of spelling errors and typos. I also found a lot of broken site-internal links. These happened because, when 16 years of content goes through three content management systems and three servers, URLs break. I also found a lot broken images because WordPress stores and handles images differently than MovableType and Greymatter.
So to fix this, I’m starting two or three new tasks:
- Fix all the internal hyperlinks so they work again.
- Restore lost images
- Or, and this is where the revisionism begins, add images to really old entries that never had such.
I have some pretty long old pages, and although they never many images to start with, I’m going to add them, just to break them up a bit and add a bit more content. This is ahistoric and violates the context in which some of the pages were first crafted but:
- Even before Greymatter I was able to add images to pages created on my site.
- I’ll keep the images historically accurate if I talk about something that existed in 2003 but no longer exists in current times, I use images of that thing in 2003.
I figure, the linkrot should be historically accurate enough and if I don’t change what I wrote, we should be cool. Anyway, the spam has been cleaned out and we’re back in business again. “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.”