In olden days…

Last month, The BradLands turned nine and today, for the first time in three years, she is whole. Almost.

Over the weekend, I finished importing nearly a decade of Must See HTTP:// entries and six years (on and off) of The Daily Brad into the new Expression Engine database. That's nearly 2,000 posts altogether, going back to 1998 when the whole thing was hand-coded, manually archived, permalinkless and filled with now-deprecated HTML.

Since a lot of those posts were stuffed into systems that didn't make them easily exportable, it was a cut-and-paste operation, which means I also had the opportunity to read almost ten years of the drivel to which I've subjected you. There're a lot of in-jokes and punchlines to which I've forgotten the set-up, a number of cryptic references to personal life trauma and a whole whale of a lot of broken links, as sites I frequented and enjoyed years ago now come back depressingly 404.

Still, there's a lot of links and love stuffed into the archives, which you can now browse by category, date or tag. Yes, I'm adding freeform tags to all of the new posts hereabout and as time permits, I'll be tagging the back catalog also (right now, just over 5% of the posts have tags attached). I've also added an "On this day..." feature to the sidebar; you can have a glimpse of what was going on in The BradLands on this day in the past. On July 17, for example, I had something to say or link to in 1998, 2000, 2001 and 2003. That may prove to be a fun feature as time goes by.

Not everything is back in place, mind you. I still have a stack of non-weblog content to re-establish, include the old OutLook commentaries, the original Dispatches From The BradLands (essays from two defunct print publications), an assortment of particularly popular features I wrote for the Post-Dispatch and other papers, and the "Maybe It's Just Me..." series, which included the Why I Weblog rumination.

And then there are the old scrapbooks (Behind the Curtain and several SXSW galleries), the junk drawer (where old April Fool jokes went to moulder) and, of course, The Cute List. I hope to get a headstart on all of those bits this weekend in my (ahahahahaha!) spare time. At all events, I hope to be finished well before the site reaches its tenth anniversary next June.

Ten years of this? No wonder I'm so tired.

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