Parsing the Past

I have been blogging for a very long time. I started for real in 2006; before then I’d been a heavy user of MySpace, but there just wasn’t enough room in a post to fit everything I wanted to say. So I used the html and css skills I’d learned from customising my MySpace profile to throw together a ‘zine on GeoCities, and set to publishing on a weekly basis.

After a few issues I tired of this, and shifted over to Blogger. That had thrilling things like archives, and feeds, and I think people could subscribe and get an email with the post instead of having to go to the actual website (imagine that!). But after a while I tired of that, and moved over to wordpress.com; and after a couple more iterations and names I ended up on a self-hosted blog under the makemorecareless.com domain.

When I inevitably tired of Wordpress and revamped this blog to its current-ish form in 2020, my philosophy was “out with the old”. There was so much baggage associated with the old site; old friends, old lovers, old attitudes. And to be honest, a lot of the posts were excruciatingly embarrassing to read, nearly 15 years on; from the time I invented the best pizza base everrrr (Italy watch out!! 😬), to the time I got in a fight with a local band’s fans in my comments and didn’t know when to drop it and move on. And all of it infused with nuclear levels of noughties LOL I’M SO RANDOM LOL CHEEZBURGER 🤪 ‘quirkiness’.

I did have a backup dump from the Wordpress site, but it was in XML format, and getting to the contents was beyond me. I mean, I did manage to get it into a spreadsheet, and I read through a few posts, which is how I know how knuckle-chewingly embarrassing some of them were. But the thought of trawling through literally hundreds of posts - while occasionally cringing myself inside out - to retrieve anything of value left me cold. So I decided to go clean slate.

Now, though, it’s current_year, and I have some skills. I’ve also been working through my handmade year project, which has actually had me wearing some items that I made and blogged about all those years ago. So, renewed, I’m digging out the XML and seeing if I can find any useful content… and maybe doing a bit of analysis while I’m at it.

First up, the raw numbers. Between the years of 2006 and 2014 I published 565 posts. This spans from those music-related hard-coded ‘zines to the last post, in which I waxed lyrical about the benefits of hand-made socks. Breaking that down by year, it turns out I posted over 200 blog posts in 2007, which is absolutely mind-boggling now that I can barely scrape together a dozen. 😅

What was I posting about? I started posting about music, and I was prolific. Just under 40% of all 565 posts were about music - gig reviews, album/single reviews, that sort of thing. I also took it upon myself for a while to compile gig listings for local venues; mostly so I could decide where I would be trotting off to after work, but also as a way to help the local music community, which was scattered both geographically and virtually.

I shifted focus to crafts pretty much as soon as Ravelry started up, as I fell deeply in love with it and Knitty and all the delightful patterns and projects and the absolute joy that was the forums. You can see it quite clearly when plotting categories over time; music just plain disappears… and so does the volume. In more ways than one (get it? volume? like on a stereo? But also total post numbers?! 🤪). The volume of my audience also dropped significantly; as people who’d subscribed for music didn’t give a rat’s ass about my adventures with sticks and string, and crafty folks had Ravelry, and didn’t really need to go to my blog to read about those adventures.

I still keep thinking about all those posts in 2007. Like… they can’t have been very long. That’s posting pretty much every other day, how much time was I spending in front of my computer? Considering that I was out at gigs like, twice a week or more so that I could even have material to write about? And, yeah, look. From the dizzy heights of almost a thousand words per post, down to 300-odd and even below 200 words per post in 2008.

The total volume, however, didn’t actually change much, despite that shift. I was effectively breaking the different sections of the ‘zine (news, reviews, listings, ponderings) into separate posts, and maintaining the same fast pace and tough self-imposed workload. Bear in mind that 70,000 words is a standard novel length; NaNoWriMo (which, incidentally, I also did a few times during this period) has you aiming for 50,000 words in a month. So I suppose spreading 70k out over a full year isn’t so bad.

Then I started wondering if there was any correlation between the lengths of the posts and how wordy I was being; but I don’t think there is. It’s almost certainly skewed by the listings posts containing lots of URLs (which are obviously longer than any word I use in my standard vocabulary) which I haven’t cleaned up. It is quite pretty though, I like a bit of alpha in my charts.

As an aside, I would like to note that it took me at least two hours to get matplotlib to recognise the custom font, so I could make these charts match the one used on this blog. Please clap.

ANYWAY. This is all a distraction (albeit a fun one) from what I was actually supposed to be doing, which was pulling some old blog posts onto the new blog. I used my xml parse to generate text files with the contents of all my craft-related posts, and skimmed through them all looking for posts I’d made about items I’m still wearing. And… drumroll…

… there were only three (3) of them.

Everything else that I blogged about in that ten year period has gone to the great wardrobe in the sky; retired or donated or recycled into something new. And everything else I made, I didn’t bother blogging about. Classic.

Oh well. I’ve added a few new posts to the archives, and maybe I can salvage some of the posts about the retired items as well, for the sake of completeness if not relevance or usefulness. But I guess I’ll be writing the rest of them from scratch, after all. 🤦‍♀️

Backfilled posts:

• Double Heelix Socks (April 2012)
• Lace-Trimmed Top (Butterick B4685) (May 2012)
• Short Shorts of the Floral Variety (July 2014)