Years before I registered robohara.com, I used a free forwarding service with the address of http://welcome.to/theoharas. The earliest working snapshot the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine has of the site is from November, 2001.
Back then, before WordPress, I ran my own “blog” software (“blog” was barely a word in 2000) that I had written in ASP and later converted to PHP. It certainly wasn’t as fancy or robust as WordPress — in fact, all it really allowed me to do was update my webpage remotely by inserting entries into the top of a text file that was displayed on the main page. Things have come a long way since then.
Over the weekend while doing some digital cleanup I found some of my old blog entries from my pre-Wordpress days, mostly from 2004 to 2006. Some of the entries covered my first NBA game, my use of a PalmPilot as a flashlight, and that time I saw the Blessed Virgin Mary Grilled Cheese Sandwich at the state fair, all from 2005.
Before work this morning I wrote a script to parse these old entries, break them into chunks, and import them into WordPress. I thought I had disabled email notifications from the site, but after one of my subscribers informed me that he had received 41 email notifications from my webpage so far, I quickly logged back in and shut it down. I didn’t have time to look at it after work today so I’ll have to take a look at it later this week or maybe this weekend. It will be nice to have all my old posts and memories together in one place again. It was fun to see the posts from June 27th, 2005, announcing that Susan was having contractions and that we were on the way to the hospital to have Morgan!
Note that WordPress just reminded me that this isn’t the first time I’ve done this. I found an earlier stash of posts back in 2007 which I imported back then. As I keep finding old piles of posts, I’ll keep stuffing them in wherever they fit.