As many know because I’ve been bitching about it for a VERY LONG TIME, companies who get paid to increase Google rankings for other companies have a tactic where they somehow hack websites like mine (good standing, lots of relevant content, no security) and put their links within my posts. The most offensive example was two Hospice care businesses who inserted their links into posts where I talk about my dying Dad. But the less offensive incidents were link insertions for roofers when I talked about getting a new roof or dentists when I talk about my fear of dentistry.
Either way – they’re inserted in a way that looks like I did it which makes it look like I’m promoting these businesses and it seems the only way to prevent it is to add security to this site which already costs me money we don’t have.
SO. I started writing at substack and began the LONG and TORTUROUS task of cleaning up 16 years of blog posts to extract into some sort of manageable format. All while trying to figure out what to do with all of this content and where to host it so that I don’t have to worry about this again.
The reason I’m also addressing this post to my kids is because I’m keeping them in mind while I clear out all of this nonsense. My parents are both gone and I would love to be able to look back and read just about anything they wrote, so I’m trying to keep that mindset in deciding what to keep and what to trash.
THINGS I AM TRASHING
- 99% of the posts I wrote about television. For the first 2 years of this blog I was a parent to ONE child who was old enough to not need me too much and so we were able to watch a LOT of TV. This was also me making up for decades of no television. This means I wrote about TV almost EVERY SINGLE DAY and no one outside that year needs to read my thoughts about the latest episode of Survivor.
- 90% of the posts about dieting. I was diagnosed with body dysmorphia and binge eating disorder around 2016? Before that I was constantly obsessing about losing weight and I refuse to document that into eternity. I did keep a few posts when they started to also be about running (which I obsessed over unhealthily too but at least that was not fatphobic) and to remind me of that mindset, but I trashed most of it.
- 100% of mundane shit. 2005 and 2006 especially was peak blogging time where people were posting and commenting nonstop because there was no form of social media that was widespread yet. Because every post I wrote got constant comments, it was like conversations with friends so I posted constantly. I can not tell you have many posts I discovered that were basically just Facebook statuses like, “I just ate a yummy sandwich!” or “I just spilled soup on my shirt!” Know there was a LOT of it and know that I deleted it all without hesitation.
NOTES ON THINGS I AM KEEPING
- Y’all…how does ONE PERSON write as much about self-improvement as I did? I’ve already mentioned how much I talked about dieting but I was constantly talking about ways to be a better parent and a better human and a better wife and I was accepting challenges or journaling prompts or daily schedule tracking to make me better in 99 different ways and I look back on it all now and just think: Kim. You were doing fine. Quit being so hard on yourself you beautiful angel.
- I probably kept a lot of crap from the years 2004-2008 that is still unnecessary but there was just SO MUCH. I got rid of probably 75-80% of the content but I still ended up with like 2-3 times more in those years than in the years following.
- I got a lot better at cohesive writing in 2010, unfortunately that meant my posts got a lot longer so I basically did a quick skim to decide so if I kept something dumb, something must have just caught my eye on the skim that seemed important.
- I stopped taking the time to add photos around mid 2008 I think? It was just taking FOREVER and so I figured maybe I could come back and do that once I figured out how to manage this content outside of this format. There’s a lot of references to photos that aren’t there for the years I was using flickr. Once I quit using flickr the photos are more frequent. KIDS: Here’s a hack, if you enter the date of the blog post to Google photos and search the surrounding days you’ll probably find whatever photos I’m referencing.
- I also deleted links because I didn’t have time to check to see if they worked. I’m rushing through this project and I didn’t want to fret about that. I don’t think it really matters in the long run.
- My end goal is to either keep all of this here in a more secure format that I can return to, or to simply have like a PDF of all of the content here to preserve for future generations. Either one will take a LOT of editing and since I have no idea how or when you might be reading this…I need it to be understood that EVERYTHING here is to be considered a Work In Progress. I’m not proofing for grammar or spelling or formatting in the beginning, I’m just cleaning it up to make it more manageable to edit. THERE WERE ALMOST 7,000 BLOG POSTS WHEN I STARTED, I had focus fist in cutting that by at least 50% if not more.
- In this cleaning/editing process I discovered that something I did moved all of my “draft” posts from a certain day to 2/11/2020. There were 148 “draft” posts written on that day which – you know – is not right. I’m going through those and trashing most (they were drafts for a reason) but the ones that should have been published I’m adding notes to pointing out there are definitely errors on the publication date.
