The Old Blogs Come Home
Something I’ve been meaning to do for years, finally done: my old Blogger blogs are moving in here, one by one.
Before this blog, and running alongside it for years without me really thinking of them as related, I kept separate Blogger sites for whatever I was into at the time — fractal art, tech links, photography. They mostly went dormant, but they never got deleted, and every so often I’d think “I should really pull that lot into 0x32 someday.” Google Takeout finally made “someday” easy: it exports a Blogger blog as an Atom feed with every post’s original title, HTML body, labels, and publish timestamp intact, so nothing needs backdating by hand. A Claude Code session parsed each export, converted the posts into Hugo front matter with their real dates, and mapped Blogger’s labels onto tags — three separate imports, one per blog.
Al’s Fractals
Al’s Fractals started in March 2008 as a dumping ground for whatever I’d rendered that week — gnofract4d parameter files, Ultra Fractal exports, Context Free grammars, the occasional XaoS zoom. It ran on and off for about a decade, drifting later into IFTTT reposts of fractal art I’d found on Pinterest, before going dormant.
148 posts came out of the export. 31 embedded images hosted on Photobucket, which killed free hotlinking years ago — those got dropped rather than published broken. The remaining 117 are live now, spanning 2008 to 2017, tagged blogger-import and fractal.
Geek Monkey
Geek Monkey was more of a linkblog — Linux distros, Raspberry Pi and Arduino projects, browser oddities, a lot of “10 free things you should bookmark” roundups, much of it reposted via feed aggregators from sites that don’t exist anymore.
218 posts came out of the export. This time I ran a full link-rot check across all 2,205 outbound links first: 54% were dead, almost all of it dead 2008–2013 feed-syndication infrastructure (FeedBurner, Gawker, AOL’s old blog network, a defunct ad service called Pheedo, Yahoo Pipes). Three posts had no surviving links at all and got dropped; the other 101 kept their content with a note added up top flagging what’s broken and why. 215 are live now, tagged blog-import and geek.
Alastair’s Doodles
Alastair’s Doodles is the big one: mostly single-photo posts, a lot of them auto-reposted from Instagram and Flickr via IFTTT with nothing but a hashtag caption, spanning 2006 to 2020 — overlapping this blog’s entire existence.
2,383 posts came out of the export, roughly ten times either of the other two. The same link-rot check found 291 posts where every link was dead; 142 of those had no surviving content once the dead links, boilerplate, and auto-post captions were stripped out, so those got dropped. The other 149 fully-dead posts, plus 397 more with some (but not all) links dead, kept their content with the same broken-link note as Geek Monkey. The remaining 2,241 are live now, tagged blog-import and photography.
So far
Three blogs’ worth of history folded in. It’s a fun read back if you’re into that sort of nostalgia — software I’d completely forgotten existed, a lot of enthusiasm for the maths of pretty pictures, and a reminder that this is at least the fourth blog I’ve run over the years. 0x32 is just the one that stuck, and now it gets to be all of them.