Rescuing The Past

I started posting into a blog around 2011, which, however you look at it, is fifteen years ago. Back then, I didn’t know much about tech, and was often pretty broke, so I went with the easiest, cheapest (free) setup, which invovled piggybacking on Nathalie’s web hosting, and posting all my shots to Flickr.

Since this was 2011 and we were all¹ naive little snowflakes, I never saw the problem with doing it this way. I had all the originals of those images sitting on hard drives, what could be the harm if I ran out of space or whatever?

Now, I’m more clued in, to the tech but more importantly the playbook of enshittification. The lifecycle of business models of internet companies. And I no longer trust my memories to Flickr. But we have a problem – they still have all my stuff.

Enter my hero, Katy DeCorah, who 8 years ago shipped a little utility that would go through a blog like mine, find all the flickr links, download them, and then update the posts to point to the downloaded assets instead of the remote links.

Flickr to Jekyll

GitHub

Migrate Flickr photos into a Jekyll site and rewrite post image links.

katydecorah/flickr-to-jekyll • Jekyll migration utility

So now, finally, my blog (and all of its images) is my own. Thank you, Katy!

1. Well, I was, anyway. ↩︎