It’s not that I’m embarrassed by my younger self, but… I’d prefer it if my blog continually contained mostly things that feel contemporary to me. Thus, employing government-sanctioned reality distortion field technology, I once again got Brian to do the heavy lifting and build me The Amazing Contemporizer1 while I kicked back, drank piña colada’s and cackled at my cat.
The Amazing Contemporizer is a plugin for WordPress which automatically sets posts older than X to private, causing a wave of privacy to flow over your older and perhaps less… refined, past as a blogger.
PS: Backup you blog before using. Seriously. No… Seriously!
Notes
- ↑1 Other names suggested were ‘I was young, I needed the money’, ‘It’s not that I’m embarrassed, but…’ ‘Youthful Folly’ and ‘The Ice Floe’.
Breaking the web, one piña colada at a time ;)
Breaking as in making the URLs not exist?
I kinda assumed that wordpress handled that gracefully with a message about private posts or something like that.
Well sure, but both “404” and “private post” leave me, as visitor, in the same position: I have no clue what was there!
The problem is inherent to the concept of compemporizing, and I can fully understand why you’d want to be judged on recent work only — but Michael, you’ve written some great stuff with good conversations attached to them, it’s ok if they’re stil there after 10 years.
Which is why you can just stick those in a category that is timeless, and the contemporizer wont make them private.
I was thinking of making the design of my blog change to look old, dusty and desolate if you were looking at archives older than a certain age :)
But yeah, I understand what you mean and agree that it’s a problem.