Blogarian Retronautics

For my first blog, I used Blogger’s engine while hosting the pages in my webspace at Seabury. At the time, it seemed the most prudent course; who knew how long Blogger would last, and what they might do with my entries if they were stored on Blogger’s servers?
 
As it turns out, my data would have been at least as safe in the memory of Blogger (then, after the buyout, the bowels of Google) than any other host I could have arranged. I certainly did not imagine that I would be exiled from Seabury, and my digital record expunged; at the time, I thought it would help heighten awareness of what an active web presence could mean to a seminary. Eventually, in part as a mark of gratitude and solidarity after Ben and Mena’s visit to Seabury (how many students made it to that event, when you could have hobnobbed with future digital superstars?), I switched over to Movable Type (wheee! Comments!) and indeed, Trevor and the Disseminary still operate from our MT installation. I got tired of the comment spam I was attracting, though, and MT was modulating from an open-source, user-oriented community to an enterprise solution; one day, my MT database got really direly, deeply corrupted — so corrupted a cadre of fine MySQL gymnasts couldn’t untangle it — and rather than restart with MT, I jumped to WordPress. Excellent comment spam filtering, still open source, and still soundly based in good HTML/CSS web design.
 
All of which is the long way round to saying that, in recognition of my tenth, I’m pulling my earliest posts out of the archives, dusting them off, and re-entering them (date-adjusted) in the WP database. I’m reassigning the comments, where there are any, and eliminating the spam. Eventually I’ll be all caught up. But sometimes, it it seems s though I”m not posting anything new at this end of the archive spectrum, it may be that I’ve just pushed forward on the ancient end.
 
Plus, it’s a way to evade work on the James commentary. (Srsly, I am actually working my way through the final-before-submitting draft; Jonathan, my research assistant, has gone through the alpha version and noted areas that want expansion, and I’m going through and amplifying them. The end is near.)
 

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