About 18 months ago, I started this blog with the intention of creating a site that was part-tutorial/how-tos, part-data exploration, and part-coding practice. Things were going pretty well! Then the hard drive where I stored everything died. This wiped out all of my files associated with my early Christianity project, including my main source file, which I had been adding to for years! It also took my 15-year Sim City game and my mods with it - but that’s another sad story for another time. The loss of my files also killed my motivation to work on my data. I had scraps of work here and there, but a lot of my major work was lost. It was all very heartbreaking.
Then, one day I was looking for something completely unrelated on my main C: drive, and saw that I still had MySQL installed. Before my other drive died, I had installed MySQL and imported my data into it so that I could get into practicing SQL again. I had even added some new records and done a ton of cleanup that had not made it in my original source files. I could have sworn MySQL was installed on the dead drive, but here it was, in all of its un-deleted glory.
I decided to export all of the data, in its current state, into JSON files and upload that to my Github project space. Protecting it from future disaster, and making it available to everyone. I had divided my data up into separate tables, and linked them together using a UUID, which is how the files are now structured on my computer and on Github. All of that raw data can be found here: timestamped-blog - raw_data_files.
I also found the motivation to reboot my blog. Going forward, I am going to use Quarto to create my site. It is quickly becoming the standard for document publishing in my job, and I am going to take this opportunity to learn more about it and how it can be used. I also find it a lot more intuitive than WordPress, and I can keep all my code, files, and content in one happy ecosystem.
My site’s source code can be found and downloaded here: https://github.com/timestamped-blog/blog-code-ver-usagi
Pic from episode #55 of Sailor Moon. I am Ami, and Usagi is my dead hard drive.