Finding an old blog site has reminded me of what was on my mind nine years ago.
Lost!
Isn't it great—and infuriating—when you find something you've spent ages searching for, and it was right there, under your nose the whole time.
I spent some time blogging on my site, ReasonCheck during 2009. At the end of that year, I got involved in a couple of projects and blogging was the casualty. I thought I'd give it a break for a month or two but it wasn't until about three years later that I got a message from a friend warning me that my site was down. Not only was it down—it was gone!
Somehow I hadn't received the notice to renew the domain and someone swiped it. And, of course, wanted a hefty price for it. So ReasonCheck was dead. I had also let the server hosting lapse, so I couldn't revive it under a new domain even if I wanted to (I didn't).
... but not forgotten
A few years ago I thought about a couple of articles I wanted to read again and found the whole site on to the Internet Archive, Wayback Machine. They take regular snapshots of sites—some going all the way back to 1996—and so you can see how a site evolved.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the mission to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge. And what a library it is! Currently, the archive contains:
- 279 billion web pages
- 11 million books and texts
- 4 million audio recordings (including 160,000 live concerts)
- 3 million videos (including 1 million Television News programs)
- 1 million images
- 100,000 software programs
Well worth dipping into.
ReasonCheck
I've been moving a bunch of sites to a new server over the past week and so had to set up a whole lot of test environments to see if they would work correctly. I needed an older version of one site so I went looking through backups and found a full set of backups of ReasonCheck. I couldn't believe that I had missed them before.
So I restored the last backup and decided to save the full site on a development machine to try and resurrect it. But it said the directory already existed. What! Yes, there it was. It's been sitting in a development directory right under my nose for years.
Getting it up and running again was no easy task. The software is way outdated. But luckily it's Wordpress so I was able to install the latest version over the original installation, and with a bit of trickery with some virtual hosts, I've got it running again.
Some of the political articles were pretty interesting in comparing what my views were nine years ago and how they panned out. I think they generally stand up well.
But the most interesting thing was reintroducing myself to my nine-year-younger self and noticing that I have softened quite a few of my views in recent years. Just getting older, I suppose.
Anyway, here's an excerpt from my introductory post, How do you do:
I see you've met my faithful handyman.
...
My faithful handyman is reason. Not only is reason our way of observing and deciphering the natural world, it's a handy tool for separating the truth from lies, the stuff that works from that which never will, reality from delusion, evidence from deception, the real world from fantasy, the rational from the mystical. It is the tool that allows us to live our lives to the fullest knowing that this is our only shot at it. And if we are to be happy, we must harness our faculty of reason to make it the best life we can.
...
So a motley collection of religious fanatics, pseudo-scientists, power-crazed politicians, bleeding-heart nannies, environment destroyers, right-wing fascists, left-wing collectivists - and all the others who think they can fool all of the people all of the time - will be in my sights.
I am for: reason, the pursuit of knowledge, science, evolution, scepticism, free markets, constitutional democracy, fighting global warming, free speech and peace. Oh - and music, technology, friends, laughter, cricket, sailing, photography and of course, my family. And some other stuff - when it crops up. My friends tell me I'm prone to hyperbole, piss-taking and sarcasm. But don't be fooled: I'm a sober, scrupulously fair and politically correct commentator. Or not.
...
I just might be posting odds and ends from my way back site and see how it holds up.
Also posted on Weku, 2018-12-06