Riffing from D’Arcy’s idea and cleaner sketch, I tried mapping out the blog history of cogdogblog.com
April 19, 2003: CogDogBlog 1.0 launched on maricopa server jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/alan using MovableType
April 26, 2005 Migrated blog to WordPress (1.5) leaving old one as archive and moving new one to jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/cdb – Content was exported from MovableType (comments were not preserved) and imported into the new WordPress site. It sat for a while with a basic Kubrick Theme with a dog header 😉 The archive site (/alan) was re-templated to remove comments and to provide a redirect to the new WP version of same entry.
Jul 20, 2005 – with idea from Steve Dembo, registered cogdogblog.com domain, for now, forwarding to the maricopa server
Nov 11, 2005 – recast design using the current style, modified from the Headspace theme
Jan 5, 2006 – moved both blog and old archive from Maricopa server to one donated by Audree at audsplace.com. I had tons of image references and links to the old jade.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu site, and while I could set up redirects on the jade server, to make it cleaner, I did a database dump, search and replaced the old URLs with the current, and rebuilt the database.
Dec 14, 2006 Too much traffic killed the favor, moved everything again to current host at DreamHost
In the long standing traditiona of this dog following the footprints of D’Arcy, I took his lead from mapping out his Blog Archaeology.
Here I try to use my own moleskin to do a timeline of the evolution of this blog. I have fewer stops along the way, but it serves as a nice reflection on what will be a 5 year anniversary next april. I’ve always been rather anal about preserving old URLs, content etc, and its why I put a lot of effort into not leaving too many dangling 404s (that I know of, I sure am not perfect).
Some thanks go along the way- like to Steve Dembo, who in July 2005 said he was tired of my then mile-long URL and suggested, even offered to buy me a domain, prompting me to shell out the $13 or whatever it cost to register cogdogblog.com.
And also, a big thanks to former Maricopa colleague Audree (a “real” programmer indeed!) who gave me free web hosting in 2006, until traffic (thanks spammers) killed the favor, when I moved the doggie piles to DreamHost.
What’s under your blog? Dig through the layers, enjoy the smell of musty old mosts, and revel in the pot sherds you may find.
Featured Image:
I set about drawing mine today, I’m a little hazy on some of the hosting details, but it goes back 8 years. That’s kind of compressed on one page.
I wish I had the first two years though – it was blogging, but it was a home built PHP+postgres solution that never migrated anywhere else. Other than that I still have all the content (though some of it is still living only on bloggers database servers), and should really merge it all into one.