If you glance at the news archive, you’ll see that once again it stretches back to the dim past of weblog days, the year 2000. Thanks to the wayback machine, I was able to recover entries from my old blog (powered by Blogger, from well before it was acquired by Google), and fulfil a commitment I made in March 2001 to move the old archives over to consequently.org.
Well, the old news archives were linked for a little while here at consequently.org, but once those entries disappeared from the server at Macquarie University, I dropped the links from the server. Now that I’ve recovered the articles, they’re back in the news archive.
The entries from March 2002 and earlier had no titles. This was an artefact of how Blogger was set up in the early years, before we used RSS feeds with titles to distribute blog entries. So, importing them into an archive where entries all must have titles forced a choice. I took the easy way out, and decided that a month’s worth of entries was an ’entry’ in the new regime, with the title ‘News from Month X.’ They’re all there.
Now you can browse through my early days of online writing, where the entries skip between short observations that now belong on twitter (hi Rory!) to personal tales of life as a young father in short order, and the archive is relatively complete.
So, I thank the hardworking people at archive.org who archive and index the history of the web. It’s been a pleasure (with its mixture of delight and embarrassment) to recover this history.
