When you migrate to a new web place, you’re bound to deal with your archives sooner or later, especially if you’ve been writing online for years like me. Admittedly, my English material constitutes a smaller corpus than the Italian’s (my first official Mac-oriented blog started in 2005 and was in Italian). When I was preparing this website for launch, roughly a month ago, I considered doing a simple export-import operation from my previous blog The Quillink Observer. Both this site and that blog run on WordPress, so importing the archives should have been a pain-free process, at least in theory.

In reality, as always, things aren’t that simple. Two main problems arose:

1. This blog has only 5 categories and a very strict group of tags (no more than a dozen), the old blog was a mess in this regard, with categories and tags implemented in a more careless fashion and being more than 80 in total. Now, importing more than 600 posts at once and then having to go through them one by one, deleting and adjusting tags & categories would have taken a huge amount of extra time — surely delaying the launch of this website of a few more weeks. Something I didn’t want.
2. The second problem is related to internal linking (posts containing links to other posts within my blog) and images. My archive of more than 600 posts contains self-referencing links and images hosted in the free WordPress.com installation of The Quillink Observer. If I had performed a mass import of all those posts, I would have had, again, to go through them one by one, correcting the links, uploading all the images on this space then changing the links that point to them when you click to see them bigger. Another daunting, time-consuming task.

So I decided to import only the most recent articles (say, from January 2011 on), and then revisit the archives periodically and proceed with small, incremental imports — starting with English articles, since this website is meant to favour English content.

The other day I patiently imported articles I wrote between January and May 2010, and I stumbled upon a few ones you have probably missed, since 1½ years ago my blog was surely even more obscure than it is now. So here they are. My very favourites are in bold.

1. The lameness of netbooks — Some observations in response to Jeff Atwood’s observations regarding netbooks and their place in personal computing. (17 January 2010)
2. Who’s afraid of the iPad? — Where, by judging some reactions to the iPad’s introduction, I feel it’s 2007 all over again, and where I make some observations regarding the iPad’s potential. (2 February 2010)
3. A wake-up call for the current state of personal computing — It seems that a lot of people, after realising the effectiveness of the iPad’s touch interface and general user experience, have started to question and discuss what’s wrong with the current state of personal computing. (5 February 2010)
4. Synchronised writing — Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Word Processors and Love Synchronisation. (17 February 2010)
5. Magic Mouse: out with the old, in with the new — After tolerating its shortcomings for too long, a couple of days ago I decided to stop using the Mighty Mouse with my primary Mac, pass it to my faithful G4 Cube, and buy a Magic Mouse. (19 April 2010)
6. Not so fast — Goodbye point-and-shoot cameras? Perhaps. Goodbye laptops? Not so fast. (28 April 2010)
7. Books are bricks — important ones. — Or: Why I’m not going to renounce my library of printed books no matter how digital the future becomes. (28 May 2010)

As always, thanks for reading.