I finally finished my Dad’s blog project (johnmatel.com). He had three blogs: a “preblog” that I designed the layout for back in high school, his Iraq blog (when he really started posting in earnest), and his regular blog after he returned from Iraq. They were all in different places and I couldn’t figure out how to export the two older blogs because whatever CMS they were on had been retired by Yahoo. Also, everything was linked to Dad’s Yahoo account and I was worried about not having control of it.

So, I decided to migrate everything to a new domain. The WordPress export for the most recent blog worked but all the images were still linked to the old site. I had to go through those posts, download all the images, and then re-upload them.

For the two older blogs, it was a full-on manual cut-and-paste job. Whew!

By the way: there were a total of 2,278 entries. It took about three months to complete. It was a tedious project and it was hard to work on for long periods of time, both for eye-strain and emotional reasons.

It was sort of fun because I got to read through all the entries as I migrated them. The Iraq ones were strange to read because I had just graduated college and was out on my own for the first time–I really didn’t even pay attention to what my dad was doing back then. It seems silly in retrospect that I was so preoccupied with learning to pay bills and function in an office environment while my dad was “embracing the suck” over in Iraq. I read all of those entries with a strange feeling of selfishness, although I also understand that it couldn’t have happened any other way. You can only figure this stuff out looking backwards.

It is such a gift to have his writing. I used to keep a blog but quit when too many other people got on the internet. Now I think I would like to start writing again. I promised myself I would do two personal blog posts this month (I thought I would finish Dad’s blog much sooner than I did) so here’s one of two. I have a whole ‘nother day to post something else. 🙂 (November 3 update: I did not get around to it)