So, I’ve been back-dating posts on my blog—but it’s not what you think!

It has nothing to do NaBloPoMo. I’ve been very, very good about posting every single day this month, and remarkably, I haven’t even found it that much of a hardship. Sure, there’s been the occasional time when I haven’t really had anything to say, and there’s been the occasional evening when it’s pushing bedtime and I still haven’t written anything, so I force myself to bang something out (kind of like tonight, actually). But I haven’t cheated!

No, the back-dating I’ve been doing has been completely legitimate. See, I’ve been writing stuff for this site since 1999. That’s right, 1999. Eight years. Is it any wonder my enthusiasm for this flags occasionally? Anyway, the site actually went live on February 3, 2000 (or so an old blog post of mine tells me), so all of my first entries were originally dated February 3, 2000. But in April 2002, Wordridden moved to a new content management system, and technical issues meant that all of the content that had been posted to that point wound up being dated April 2002.

This was somewhat irksome, but I just kind of accepted it as The Way Things Had to Be. But this afternoon, something finally clicked. See, I always write and save my blog posts either in Word or a text editor before posting them to my site, so I have pretty much every file for every thing I’ve ever produced for Wordridden…and those files are dated…so it didn’t take a whole lot of effort to go in and change the dates on the website to match the dates on which the earliest posts were actually written.

That’s pretty much what I’ve spent the evening doing (with a pleasant diversion for a steak dinner and a stimulating conversation with Jeremy), and I am delighted to say that the Wordridden archives have now expanded backwards to take in the three years leading up to the CMS changeover in 2002. I’ve dated all of my early stuff (namely, from 1999) with the date of writing, not the date of posting, because the content makes more sense that way—at least in my own personal timeline—and I feel really rather pleased that the archives once again accurately reflect the history of my humble blog.

What’s interesting is that, in the course of trawling through my old files, I’ve discovered things that I started writing but never finished, things I finished but never posted (for better or worse), and things that I both finished and posted but which apparently got lost somewhere in the move from the old CMS to the new one. I’ve also rediscovered a lot of writing that I really like, and I’ve realized just how diligent I was about updating the site when I first started Wordridden.

I hope to revisit my own archives in more depth over the next few days—because nothing says “navel-gazer” like reading your own blog for fun.