Word came down yesterday that the days of Yahoo! 360° are numbered. Thus, with everything else on my plate, I had to worry about the preservation of my old Reflections Beyond Technology blog. Fortunately, Yahoo! offered what appeared to be an easy path to preservation, which was to migrate it to my (new?) Yahoo! profile page. This, as they say, was better than nothing, although I discovered that all of my tag information had been lost. Another thing I could do was create my own archival version. This turned out to be a zip file consisting of a single txt file with the HTML code for each of the 262 entries (again, without any tag information) and a folder for all of my images. Apparently the Yahoo! idea of an archive has a basic understanding of data and something between benign neglect and abject ignorance where metadata are concerned!
In the best of all possible worlds, I would like to migrate the Reflections Beyond Technology blog, as it was first written and tagged, into a new blog that I have actually now created on Blogger. However, neither Yahoo! nor Blogger has provided the tools to enable such a migration; and, as what are laughingly called the "Blogger Help Resources" observe, there is little I can do other than recreate the blog, item by item, making sure that all hyperlinks still point in the right direction. Meanwhile, I now have the new site on Yahoo!, which lacks any support for search and any metadata tools for browsing.
My guess is that nature is telling me to take a serious look at what I wrote on Reflections Beyond Technology under the assumption that it is not really necessary to keep it all for posterity. Having thus sobered myself, I can construct a new, revised and reduced, version as an new Blogger blog, bringing the old tags back to life before Yahoo! consigns them to the ash-heap of history along with the rest of Yahoo! 360°. This is probably the fairest way to proceed. For all I have written about the value of high-quality editing, I suppose it is about time I apply some of that value to myself!
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