If you visit my home I promise I will offer you food and drink because it is how I was raised. Guests are treated with respect, unless they happen to the kind of obnoxious morons who deserve to be fed Ex-Lax brownies.
This blog is my cyber home so I can’t really feed you but I can show you pictures of food and tell you I am sorry you can’t eat it.
It is sort of like having a wish sandwich. You know the kind of sandwich where you have two pieces of bread and wish you had some meat to put in between them.
I spent some time trying to fix some odds and ends around the blog and got lost in the archives. Some of that was because I read some old post and some because I was trying to fix the layout so it would look better.
As I sifted through the old material I saw how I had run I Had A Dream twice. The first was in October 2005 and the second was in 2006.
Back then I didn’t know much about SEO and I never worried about duplicate content. Thought about whether I should nuke one and decided I wanted to keep it so I added a photo.
And then I remembered a story I wrote on the other blog called The Dream that was sort of tied into that original post and mulled over whether I should connect the two in some way.
What Happens When Your Ass Surrenders?
That is not a euphemism, it is tied into Excuse me, There is Toilet Paper Stuck To Your Tuchus.
Once upon a time there was an audio post attached to that in which I described an incident at my gym where I looked up at the wrong time and saw a naked man walk through the locker room with toilet paper attached to his butt.
Sorry, sometimes you have to share the ugly images. 🙂
Anyhoo when the audiopost was attached to the post I wrote about it the line below worked and it made people laugh.
Sadly the audio was lost so we can’t enjoy the tale together nor will you get to hear some of the fabulous old audio posts that used to live here.
The Beauty of Blogging
The archives here are part of what I call the beauty of blogging. There are some goofy stories in there and posts that I hate to see again because I think the writing is awful.
There are some goofy stories in there and posts that I hate to see again because I think the writing is awful.
But there are also some very good memories that I had forgotten about. There are moments in my children’s lives that I had forgotten about but thanks to the posts I wrote I got a chance to revisit them.
I like that, especially now because the boy who was 3.5 when I started is going to turn 15 this year.
Some of the funny things he used to say and do are safely ensconced here. My memory is good, but there is too much to keep track of and this joint you are visiting helps secure things from escaping from a leaky brain.
Walk through the archives and you get to enjoy other nonsense too, like the Dad Blogger Link Bait- The List You Wish You Were On and then you remember the more things change the more they stay the same.
When we do it right, this blogging thing provides us with a snapshot of a moment in time and some of those are worth experiencing again.
On the other hand others are less so, there is not eye bleach to make me forget the dude from the gym. There are worst things, but that doesn’t mean I have to like remembering. 🙂
One More Thing About The Archives
I still haven’t finished cleaning up the archives the way I want to but I’ll figure it out.
I have been thinking about them for a different reason than just to make them look good and work well.
When I moved to a single column look and killed the sidebar I removed the recent content widget and some of the other tools I used to try and encourage readers to read more than one post.
So I have been trying to figure out a good way to help people see some of the older material here too. I’ll save those thoughts for a different time, that teenager I mentioned earlier needs some help from dear old dad.
See you in the comments.
Very interesting topic.
Repurpose old posts is one of the most important (overlooked) ways to get more traffic and get people to stay on your blog. I have read about the importance of adding a html sitemap, but the only thing I’ve done so far is to add links to the old posts in my new posts.
Are you referring to an HTML sitemap for readers or bots to crawl?
I believe it’s for both. Bots crawl the XML, but if you add a html sitemap for your readers, it might help them visit more of your old posts and it’ll also be helpful for the bots. But, not sure how this works, just read a blog post about it not long ago.
A walk down memory lane – blog style? Sounds good.
It’s fun reading old passages and thinking of the times, but l get hyper critical of my writing.
I am the same way with my writing. Sometimes I read my work and cringe.
I’m still lost on the whole SEO thing, and have the blog layout that someone did for me.
I ever make enough $, and I swear I’m going to either hire someone to revamp everything, or pay for either Diva or Wolf to learn this crap.
My attempts to learn it have resulted in me curled up in the fetal position.
Part the joy of blogging comes from trying to figure out all the crap that seems to be baffling but necessary.
I boil it down to just write for people and good things will happen.