Archives Back Online
I've restored most of the archives from my Radio weblog from 2002-2003 and the weblog I ran on eighty-twenty.net from 2003-2005. There's a couple of posts in there just telling that story. Radio exports a gigantic XML file that contains all my old entries. I had an incomplete backup of The Eighty Twenty Solution that took me to mid 2004, but I was missing almost a year's worth of posts. I was able to get my last 5 posts from the Bloglines cache; for some reason, archive.org had only a few snapshots from mid-2004, which didn't help at all. Then I had a realization - I have a very old copy of RssBandit installed on my machine, and RssBandit keeps a cache of old entries in RSS format. I was able to resurrect about 18 more entries from the RssBandit cache of my feed. And just tonight, I realized that I have a cache of my entries from NewsGator Inbox in Outlook that fill in a hole between August, 2004 and December, 2004, so one of these days, I'll have to work on getting those imported.
Note to self: do a better job with backups.
On the plus side, importing all these diverse data sources has been a great opportunity to learn Ruby.
Dominique Boucher had a post about adding Google Ads to his blog, and his post explains exactly why I did the same thing on eighty-twenty (there are Google Ads on this blog, but they go to Peter Provost, who owns agileprogrammer.com). I initially started by putting Google Analytics on the few pages that were parked on eighty-twenty, since I had to do that for my employer and wanted to learn a little about how Analytics worked. Then, as I began restoring archives, I ran into some old experiments with the Amazon API, which led to putting Associates ads onto various pages, and then Google ads. In some ways, it's just an experiment - I'd like to see how changing ads and positioning affects things, and how I can use my own content to drive Amazon and Google (and possibly Yahoo!, I'm thinking about signing up for an account, just for grins). My referrers from Radio show that 3 years later, I'm still getting hits for all kinds of oddball things - I'd rather that those hits potentially towards paying my hosting charges, rather than going to a dead site. It's been funny seeing Eighty-Twenty come alive again - looking at my access logs for 2007, there's this huge spike upwards in traffic when I started putting content back online.