Deathless Prose

… Scurrying about with my scatter-brain at the library, I happened across a tome which I have been looking for - although I didn't know it until I read it. “Internet Annoyances - How to fix the most annoying things about going on line” by Preston Gralla. Some of the stuff I knew, other things I didn’t need to know, but all of it presented in a readable, usable fashion.

But the top tip of all was The Wayback Machine - a separate archive of web sites (and blogs!) going back to 1996. Pages that have been stored there can be accessed if you have the URL - EVEN IF THE SITE IS DEFUNCT! It doesn't have all pages, and only some graphics are supported. But a quick check revealed an embarrassing biography of one of my alter egos that I had assumed (hoped) was lost forever. A few other searches revealed similar effectiveness. Not every page ever made is there, but usually something turns up, including a favorite post that I thought I'd never read again.

Just for fun, I searched for this blog, and I found about two weeks worth of posts from last year. It was in an older format, with long-gone links listed in the sidebar.

And then it hit me. With its expanding database (over 1 petabyte, and adding 20 terabytes daily), everything anyone ever writes here will likely end up in some server somewhere, forever…

Cool.

Uh-oh. I'd better pay a little more attention to my grammar.

… And I'd better make sure that all my elisions are faithful…