There’s a lot of information stored all over the Internet about me, about you, about everyone. At best, most of it can just go away because it’s useless, at worst it is potentially harmful. A humorous take on this by Molly Lewis:
The place that this is the most obvious is social media. I really liked this post on old tweets by Vicki Lai which talks about the why and how of deleting Tweets. It applies to all social media. But this all got me thinking about my blog.
Blog posts tend to be more thought out (or at least I try) and seem to me to be part of the larger web. So just deleting them after a matter of time doesn’t feel the same as tweets. If someone was writing about the Unity HUD I would hope they’d reference my HUD 2.0 post, as I love the direction it was going. I have other posts that are… less significant. The ones that are the most interesting are the ones that are linked to by other people, so what I’m going to do is stop linking to old blog posts. That way posts that aren’t linked to by other people will stop being indexed by search engines and effectively disappear from the Internet. I have no idea if this will actually work.
The policy that I settled on was to have the latest five posts on my blog page, and then having the archives point to posts of the last two years. This means I need to write five posts every two years (easy right!) to keep it consistent. Turned out implementing it in Jekyll was a little tricky, but this post on Jekyll date filtering helped me put it together.
I think that my attitudes to data are generational difference. For my generation the idea that we could have hard drives big enough to keep historical data is exciting. Talking to younger people I think they understand it is a liability. Perhaps fixing my blog is just me trying to be young.
posted Oct 1, 2018 | permanent link
