Making my blog open source

Over the weekend I read a post from Brandur about the need for the need for blogs to degrade gracefully over time. It resonated with me for a number of reasons. First, because there are blogs I remember reading at that are near impossible to find archives of now. Second, because my own archive is pretty poor too.

It’s the podcast I hosted while at university between 2005 and 2006 that I am most disappointed about losing, however. We used a service called LibSyn, an early podcasting platform, to store and distribute the show, but a few months after I moved to London we stopped podcasting and payments to the platform lapsed. The podcast’s old URL now just 404s, and there is no account associated with any of our email addresses.

So, in the spirit of not letting this happen again, I’m taking Brandur’s advice and publishing my Github repo. Should this blog ever be of “significance” finding an archive of it should be easy enough, and, given that all the content is written in Markdown, extracting the actual words will be pretty easy too.