You know you’ve been blogging too long when:

You know you’ve been blogging too long when:

You end up writing a script to archive any posts or comments older than seven years in a separate database, in order to clean them out of your live blog.

This is actually the first time I’ve split my blog archive in that way in over a decade. I’m such a hoarder, but it got to the point where having posts still around from 1999 (no, seriously) was more embarrassing that it was cool.

So now there’s a script that gets run against the DB every… whenever-I-decide-to-cron-it that trims content out based on its age and level of engagement. So at various intervals of 3, 5 and 7 years posts get first flocked, then marked private, then finally shifted — along with all their comments, but not taxonomy or metadata which actually I should’ve done but oh well — into the “archive” table and off the site. Having comments gets a posted shifted “back” a removal increment, but in the end (i.e. after 7 years) everything goes.

Or I can give post a noarchive meta key to preserve them, if they’re really that great (hint: they’re not).

Isn’t SQL fun?

… man I’ve been doing this way, way too long.