Some things sneak up on you. For example, it seems I've had a blog for over 20 years. Since January 2000 to be precise. I've hosted it at crashposition.com and then here at computus.org.

crashposition.com in 2000

Behind the scenes those posts have lived on a variety of publishing platforms.

  • For the first couple of years each post was hand-rolled in HTML.
  • In July of 2002 the blog moved to the new hotness that was Movable Type.
  • In 2006 it moved again, this time to Wordpress where it has lived until this year.
  • During the summer I migrated everything across to Ghost.

The blog has always explored temporal issues. But it had also accreted a lot of redundant material along the way. I wanted to focus it back on topic. I was also looking for a more appropriate platform. Ghost seems to be a good fit.

So what's changed?

A few years ago I pulled all the blog posts from both websites into one place. These ~250 posts are now on The Computus Engine and will remain there. All other projects such as the monthly wallpaper are moving to a brand new site at crashposition.com. There will be more on that to follow.

Sifting through 22 years of material has been an interesting exercise.

Moving the posts was easy but remastering them to the standards of 2022 was a much bigger ask. After two decades, what does a blog remaster even mean? Remasters in other media have a chequered history (I'm looking at you George Lucas). Could this even be controversial territory? I'd be interested to know what you think.

Here's the rules I came up with:

  • No substantive changes to the original text. Other than correcting the odd typo, none of the original copy has changed. The early posts are as embarrassing as a I remember.
  • The URLs for all the posts are unchanged. Bookmarks and back-links should all still work.
  • All the photos have been up-ressed to modern standards. I've used the original high-res photos if I still had them. Check out Decoding Harrison.
  • Any post without an image, got an image.
  • Many posts about an event now include more photos. Check out HM Bark Endeavour in Greenwich, Patrick's Picnic and  Atomic Clock comes to RGO.
  • A lot of early posts dealt with the now redundant Flash Platform. Rather than remove them, I've chosen to tag them. They may yet be of archeological interest. I've placed a callout in any post that had previously contained embedded Flash content.
  • Many of the links in the first decade used the insecure HTTP protocol. I've moved most of these links over to HTTPS where a modern URL exists.
  • After 20 years it's no surprise that some posts had dead links. Many dead links and dead YouTube content have been updated to point to similar modern content.
  • I have a couple of heavily trafficked posts that are showing their age. I haven't gone there yet but expect I'll modernise those so they're more relevant.

I was in two minds about updating dead links. In the end I decided that if I'm keeping this content around then it should be useful. If anyone cares enough about the original links then it is best to visit the Wayback Machine.