I’m working to preserve my memories of the early days of my nomadic life, but technology isn’t helping me.

Before I thought to get my own name as a URL, my time as a nomad (starting in 2004) was captured on my travel-focussed site, Vicarious Vistas.

When I started that site, I hand coded it. I had a background in HTML and I liked to keep current in it. At some point, I started using Dreamweaver but the underlying site was still HTML.

Then, around 2010, I think, I migrated the site to Drupal. The educational charity I was working for at the time wanted their site redesigned, and I was our lead. My research showed that Drupal was better than Joomla! for our needs, and in a footnote I noted that WordPress was promising but not there yet.

We went with a contractor building in Drupal (Hi, Ben!), so I thought I should learn it for myself. I made Vicarious Vista a Drupal site, and played with the technology.

Eventually Drupal decided that they didn’t care about hobbyists like me, wanting to focus on where the money was, contractors like Ben. The learning curve got a lot steeper, standard features became extras, and the plugin environment became confusing.

Simultaneously, WordPress was moving from a microblogging platform to a true content management system. So I jumped to WordPress.

But somehow, along the way, I lost a lot of my Drupal content. I thought I’d also lost the old, hand-coded HTML pages. But I found an archive of them just recently.

So I’m slowly but surely migrating a bunch of posts from 2004-2010 from HTML to this site. I’ve moved about twenty posts so far. I’ll organize them in a bit, using categories or tags, so they’re more discoverable.

I don’t plan to get caught by a technology change again. I not only have archives of this site, I have a home-based mirror of it, and a text copy of every post. which are themselves backed up. Hopefully that’s enough.