Future is all in the past for weblog writers

Net Results: "I tend to live in the past because most of my life is there," the much loved late Herb Caen, longtime columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, once wrote.

People who keep weblogs tend to feel the same. OK, we might not exactly live in the past so much as value the past as it has been created then stored in our weblog's archives, but our past posts are the essence of our weblogs.

Blog posts of times past are central to the whole notion of keeping a blog, because it stands as a day-to-day record of what the blog writer (or writers), and often its readers through their comments, were thinking on a given subject.

I know from viewing the traffic records for my Techno-culture blog that, on my own weblog, the bulk of daily viewings are not from people who come to the site to see what posts are on it at this particular moment, but those who are brought there via links or search engines to look at something from my archives.

Searchers range from people seeking to read an article I've written and posted three years ago on the tech industry's love for khaki trousers, or archived material on data retention, to images of a famous swimmer from the 1920s or a link to an item about space travel.

I've had people come searching for my Icelandic grandmother's recipe for vinartarte, a Christmas pastry made annually by my family, and for an article I linked to in the New York Times two years ago, on monitoring the flatulence of termites. Oh the wonders and inanities of the blogging world, all living there in the past.

Odd then, that bloggers find it unusually difficult to try to preserve the past if they choose to do something as mundane as switch blogging software.

Or maybe not.

As the blogging software arena has grown more competitive, making it hard to move to new software is one strategy for conserving your user base.

Whatever the case may be, I decided that, after a couple of years using Userland Software's friendly Radio blogging software, I might try something new. While I like Radio, and like the way my weblog looks, I have found Radio is very unfriendly for people who travel - as I often do - and want to post while on the move.

Because the main Radio programme is kept on one's individual Mac or PC, the computer on which the software is stored has to be running to make posts to the weblog. That's fine if you keep the software on a server at work or keep your computer on at all times, as you can use a little function to post remotely by e-mail.

But if, like me, you don't want to keep your home computer running for a week or two while you are away, your weblog goes dead.

Some other programmes are set up so that you can post from anywhere and your blog is updated right away. That led me to consider trying something new and also to experiment with a new programme.

A plethora of options presented themselves, software by WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Yahoo, Movable Type, and a dozen more. I checked out the features, I looked at the design templates, I considered look and feel.

I decided on one or two to try. And then I hit the wall. None offers an easy port for all those archived posts and comments from the old program to the new program. In other words, I could set up my blog again with the new software and a new design but I'd lose my past, several years of it; the whole history of my weblog, the whole POINT of a weblog.

Yes, some people who have successfully done such an archive transfer posted what they termed easy guides to bringing over all the archived posts, but "easy" turned out to mean "easy" if you know at least some basic programming, can understand little scripting programs and how to personalise the ones you need to use to suit your own data, that can also then go back and clean up all the bits that don't port over neatly.

I would be considered a reasonably skilled computer user (although definitely not a programmer), but this all went right over my head - which means it will surely go over the heads of the average blogger. As a result, in the end I felt I had no choice but to renew my existing software and wait another year, to see if anyone comes up with an easy way to export and import the data from an old blog using Radio to a new blog using some other program.

All of this points to a major issue for the web world - how ephemeral the past is. People think that, because Google archives webpages, all websites will exist forever and the past can never be lost. But this isn't true.

Google only archives some webpages, and the tediousness of finding the history of anything via a web search rather than via an organised set of permanent links is not likely to help us preserve the past anyway.

A personal weblog might not seem like the most crucial historical information, but consider what happens generally when links change or pages are taken down - how easy it is to erase the past deliberately or lose a historical record of this period in time, when much goes up on the web that isn't recorded in any other way for posterity (print, video or sound).

In my own modest case, I weighed the attractions of trying something new in blogging software against a responsibility I felt for maintaining my weblog's past for other readers, and decided the past had to win out against the present. For now, anyway.

weblog: http://weblog. techno-culture.com