An Experiment in Preservation

So Geocities, the first major free web hosting that dates back to the mid-1990s, is shutting down its service and taking all of its free web pages offline on October 26th. I created my first website way, way back in the summer of 1997 when personal webpages were a lot more rare and one had to know HTML in order to make one. I was entirely self-taught, and I'm rather proud of what I managed to design back in the day. But that site is now well over a decade old, and I'm definitely not an undergrad anymore, and a significant portion the content was derived from papers I wrote in my undergrad classes, although quite a bit was original (such as mon journal de bord souverainiste, which was basically a blog from back in the day before blogging software existed or online journals were called blogs). So I'm a bit sad that all of this content is going to disappear off the web, except for what some archiving services might copy, but it's all on my hard drive, and I realized that most of it is so old and out of date that it's not really worth my time or the effort to move it over to another free hosting site. But, it occurred to me that the texts worth preserving, the ones that I know that people have linked to and used frequently over the years, such the "Refus Global" and "Speak White" and other important cultural texts that weren't on the web at all back in the mid-90s until I took the time to type them up and post them there, well, those ones are worth keeping online for other people to continue to google up and link to. So, I thought that I could post each one as a blog entry, and it would still be google-able and each entry would come up as individual webpage, so that's what I'm going to do. Consider the experiment started....

I should probably update my blog too, but this first semester at a new school and prepping my weekly grad class is keeping me too busy these days to do anything more than this copying and pasting exercise!