Looking at other people's blogs made me think about how long ago I started a blogging. I didn't have an answer, so I did what any reasonable person would do: I started looking for my (nick)name on search engines. By doing this I found at least two old blogs: one hosted on altervista (a very well-known free web hosting provider in Italy back then) and one on wordpress.com.
Why should this stuff be scattered around? And why should my current personal blog's earliest post be from 2013 when I know I had a web presence much earlier than that?
So I decided to take those articles and copy them on this website.
Unfortunately the first blog I have memory of (the one on altervista) is no longer online, but I managed to snatch some of the articles using the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (by the way, you should donate to the Internet Archive, if you can). Unfortunately not everyithng was archived, so some articles (six by my count) have not been migrated here. All of the entries from this blog (29 articles) are in Italian, and they date from 2007-02-28 to 2009-06-26.
The other blog (the one on wordpress.com) only had six articles. Of those, three are in Italian and three in English. They date from 2011-02-12 to 2011-09-04 (this was a short-lived one, apparently).
Re-reading my old stuff
Re-reading the articles I had a couple of insights:
- Apparently the name "klezlab" (stylized as KlezLab) was first used in March 2008, as this post evidences wishing a happy first birthday to the blog.
- That same post says KlezLab was substituting a previous blog called OpenWorld. I have no recollection of that blog.
- Apparently a post had been migrated from this mysterious OpenWorld blog, since it's dated 2007-02-08, a year and a month before the purpoted birth date of KlezLb.
- I started that first blog when I was around 19 and stopped blogging on it when I was nearing 22. Most of the stuff in there is really cringeworthy (and vaguely edgy).
- I half-ate the onion in a post when discussing the famous Is Your Son a Computer Hacker? satirical article.
Some technical notes
This is where you would expect the source code for the script I used to retrieve those old posts, convert them to markdown and post them on this blog.
Well, unfortunately I did this by hand. It only took 3-4 hours.
I copied the markup directly from the page sources and only transformed paragraphs (as in <p> tags) to bare lines (which markdown then interprets as paragraphs). I don't know why I did this last thing, but when I thought about it I was almost done, so it stayed that way.
Coming from the Internet Archive, all the links in the posts from the older blog are Internet Archive links, but they were all pointing to a specific date. So I used sed to go through all those links and use an asterisk instead of the archive date (e.g. https://web.archive.org/web/*/http://example.com).
Unfortunately, some of the linked stuff is not available on the Internet Archive, even when a link to it is provided in the posts.
Finally, I put a big red disclaimer on top of every post explaining where it comes from and the fact that, being old, those posts may not reflect my current opinions. The disclaimer links to this post for further detail.
Further work
I know there's stuff that is not included here that I remember having written. Which means that it's either part of the "lost articles" from the oldest blog or there are other blogs I left to rot around the internet. I'll write an update in case I find anything else.