Revisiting the past.

I hate incompleteness. Take my writing for example. It irks me that I have years worth of writing, sitting doing nothing worthwhile.

So, whilst I started this new blog from scratch, intending on a fresh start, I have since made the choice to import the posts from my old Nerdrooted blog to here.

Yes, that domain is still active, and with it the Publii version of that blog, but that will die over the coming months as I'll most likely let that domain lapse, and with it Nerdrooted will be no more.

Which is kind of sad, because at one time it was both my main domain name and main social media handle, as Sar has apparently become quite common now. Mind you Nerdrooted never really made much sense, but at least it was unique!

The work so far...

I've imported and fixed up 5 years' worth of posts, including featured images for posts, so they don't stick out like sore thumbs on the front page. Astonishingly that only amounts to 30 posts!

I've tagged them all, and they will live in the "From the Archives" section of the site from now on.

Hopefully, if the site ever moves again, to another platform etc, then I'll be able to lift the lot, wholesale, and move everything together. However the main issue was that my old posts were split between WordPress and Publii, neither of which were archived together, and Ghost will only import Wordpress XML. That means just the content, none of the images.

So I've had to spend a while over the past couple of days, going back through the Uploads folder of my backup of the old WordPress site and re-inserting header images at the very least, more easily where I had a clear historical reference from the Wayback Machine archive!

What's become clear during all of this, is that around the start of Shadowlands I had a LOT of trouble choosing a main, and indeed Legion & Shadowlands were a pretty tumultuous time for me, in terms of raiding guilds and main character choices.

Thankfully things have been a bit more stable over the past few years, with only 2 guilds and 1 main character to speak of.

A way to go yet...

Still to go there are another 140-ish posts, which forms the preceding years of 2015-2020. Which just shows, that when compared to 2020-2025, how steeply my blogging habit dropped right off. 140 vs 30. Huge dip in output.

I have no doubt that that is mainly due to my social media usage, namely Twitter at the time, and with it back then the ability to fire screenshots out to Tweets from within game. Still a feature I miss. Not Twitter per se, but the ability to fire out a social media post from within game.

But my blogging habit mainly died off because due to social media, I then preferred to tweet something out quick, rather than sit and compose an actual blog post about it, or put my thoughts down in a longer form.

And while, since the death of Twitter, my social media habit has continued at a lesser pace, my love of writing a blog has seemingly resurrected itself.

It's actually ironic that my social media use has increased from where it was prior to starting this blog, in promoting my posts etc

For a lot of months prior to this Elder Logs creation, my social media use in general had more or less fallen off completely. So I was neither writing a blog nor using social media, meaning my writing muscles were in a increasing state of atrophy.

Now it seems I've found a nice balance between the two, able to cross-post to Mastodon, Bluesky and Threads. Not only for article promotion, but for general social media posting too. I found a couple of apps & services that help with that, but I'll maybe go into that further in another article...

Moving forward by sitting still

Over time I'll work on fixing up those older posts and getting them re-published as accurately as possible with the correct images and so forth. It's not like they'll see much traffic to be fair, this is more for my personal satisfaction in all honesty.

I just like to see my writing up and available for perusal. More for me, as a diary of sorts, so I can remind myself of the things I've done or said or gone through. For example in one of my posts (that's yet to be resurrected), I talk about having a very hard time in or around November 2018, where I was apparently having a very difficult time in terms of mental health. And right now I have no memory of that situation.

The blog post is, perhaps rightly, pretty vague as to the details, but reading it is hard for me, but necessary IMO.

And it's that sort of thing I want to preserve. Yes, 90% of my blog posts used to be about World of Warcraft, and that percentage since starting the new blog has more than halved, and I'm now writing about a lot more than just Wow. But it's the totality of my past self I want to keep. The good, the bad and the WoW posts 😉

So I'll work away quietly in the background, fixing up posts as and when I have time, restoring my past one post at a time, all the way back a full 10 years and more.

I just wish I still had a backup of all my old The Yarn.net posts lying around. I'd be tempted to import those too so I had a full blog history. That thing went back to around the turn of the millennium between 1998 to 2001, which by the time it died was over 16/17yrs worth of posts.

I suppose that's one good reason to stay put where I am right now moving forwards - preserving my past self for future me.

As a short aside, I did recently find via the Wayback Machine an old Yarn.net article I wrote, and in it I mentioned meeting "a fantastic woman" who I'd just started dating back in early 2003.

We've now been married for 22 years ❤️

Looking to the future

Eventually I could potentially return to WordPress, but for right now I'm quite happy with Ghost. It's a lot more streamlined than WordPress is/was, and with Ghost I just write. Themes wise it's a lot more constrained, particularly on my subscription level where I'm confined to the basic Ghost themes, but even inclusive of the paid themes, this default theme is probably the one closest to where I'd want the site to look.

I was very happy with how my old WordPress blog ended up looking by the time I killed it, but maintenance was a full on pain in the ass. Updating umpteen security plugins, themes, backend plugins etc all the time. And the writing experience became painful too, as WordPress's implementation of their block editor was more complicated and finicky than was in any way required.

The entire experience, both writing and maintaining the blog was relentless and became more of a drain on my time than it should have been. Which is also partly why my blogging activity dropped off too. But it is also why Ghost is so freeing for me, because with the site hosted by Ghost themselves I have no need to worry about security and so on.

Would enabling subscriptions and paid tiers of content help with offsetting costs?

Honestly, no. I'm well aware of the level of traffic this site is likely to be getting. I've no actual idea, as that's one of the things Ghost doesn't provide, visitor stats or website impressions. It's more about subscriptions than site visits, the opposite of WordPress.

I'm far from a professional writer, as this is a hobby for me, and this site would not generate in a year what it costs to run for a few months. And it's not about the costs anyway. It's about the love of writing, being able to spill my internal monologue onto digital paper for the world to see perhaps the most intimate version of me they'll ever see.

As an example, my dormant Facebook account aside, I don't think I've ever posted a single image of myself online. The thought abhors me. But writing? Yeah I'll do that all day long.

Anyhow, as I said I'll be fixing up old posts on an ongoing basis. I'll probably post about it specifically again when the archive is complete, and we're fully up to speed with 10+ years' worth of content!