Catalog Your Blogs

Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi

I've always loved writing. When I entered the tech industry, it felt natural that I would gravitate towards the idea of blogging. Many of my early articles were contributions for my company's website. Company blogs are a great platform to write on. I learned to work with other departments (usually marketing since they were the ones in charge of the website) and they were always very grateful to get more content.

As I moved from company to company, I tried to continue this practice.
One of the problems I have run across is, the internet is not really a permanent thing. Websites get rewritten, articles get lost, companies sometimes remove the blogs of former employees.

As a result, many references to my old blogs were suffering from link rot.

This is not really an uncommon thing. But I had wish I had preserved the articles I've written since they represent past work that I'm proud of.

So with the help of the Wayback Machine, I started collecting some of my past articles and putting them into a GitHub repo.

My process for this looked something like:

1.) Find an old URL and look for it in the Wayback Machine
2.) Save a PDF or PNG using a Chrome extension
3.) Commit to GitHub repo

Having a catalog in GitHub works pretty well since I can browse the articles pretty easily and previewing PDF's and PNG's are not a problem.

They feel just as relevant as any side coding project I've ever done.

I also started collecting other articles I've written for other websites and made a repo for those.

In conclusion, if you have blogs on other platforms and websites that are not your own, it's a good idea to keep record of it. I was only able to recover a fraction of what I've written in the past from the Wayback Machine, but that is a good place to start. I would also recommend putting current blogs in a repo for posterity, because you never know when those references will experience link rot as well.