Last night I found an old copy of robohara.com on CD. Back before I ran WordPress (which I installed in 2005), I had my own blogging system I cobbled together with a bunch of poorly written ASP and PHP scripts. The one (only?) good thing about that old system was that all the entries were stored in a separate HTML file. Based on that I was able to open up the files in Chrome, manually copy the text of each individual entry, and paste them into WordPress.

I started on this early this morning before work. Before starting I disabled the plug-in that e-mails out updates, unchecked the boxes that send blog updates out to Facebook, Twitter and Google+, and even added another plug-in to keep these posts from showing up in my RSS feed. Imagine my surprise when just before it was time for me to report to work I was contacted by two different readers informing me that their e-mail inboxes were being flooded by these old updates.

After sending out an emergency SOS via Twitter, my friend Charles G. Hill (the man behind dustbury.com) suggested I try disabling Jetpack as well. I did, which stopped the outgoing flood. This evening, after work, I was able to import the rest of those old posts.

The ironic thing about all of this is that the vast majority of the posts I imported were terribly uninteresting. Some of them would barely pass for tweets or Facebook updates today. I was also really awful at coming up with post titles back then. I saw lots of posts with titles like “Wow” and “Boring Weekend” and “Zzz” and so on. My blog didn’t have a search engine back then so making things searchable wasn’t all that important.

Thanks to Paul and Greg for letting me know about the feed blast and Charles with coming up with the solution. This was a big mess with little payoff, but there was a big gap of updates missing from 2005 that have been filled.