Old Bookmarks

I am a digital pack rat. I have backups of old backups for most things. Naturally, the things I wanted the most died with old hard drives or other bit rot. One of the reasons I have learned to keep backups is I have on more than one occasion, realized I deleted something I wanted to keep just as I hit rm -r

For one reason or another I was grepping something today and came across a file called bookmarks.html. Actually, I came across several of them. The one I chose was created in 2011. I picked the largest one, opened it in Firefox, and started browsing through them.

It has been a trip down memory lane for sure. The neat aspect of it for me is I never really had them too organized back then, so they somewhat grouped in the order that interest captured my attention. In my spare time I will be perusing through them and seeing if I don’t come across any neat gems from way back when.

It certainly reminds me a lot of the days when websites were mostly unique and made by someone who cared about them. Nowadays they are mostly boilerplate created for AdSense by artificial intelligence stuff. No one dares to be different besides making navigation as simple yet somehow convoluted as possible.

I guess in a way they are sort of a story of me, much like this blog. On here, as my interests morphed over time, my topics changed. The same with these favorites. There was a group of Linux stuff, then FreeBSD, which is what stuck with me all those years ago. I even came across a couple of personal blogs I used to look at that seem to be still going all these years later.

I saw a bunch of links to stuff from Myspace. Bands and some other stuff were linked. Myspace might as well be nonexistent now because there’s not much there any longer. Who would have guessed how quickly they would fall back then?

There were some links to stuff hosted on Geocities, which is gone completely off the net now. There used to be some neat and extremely creative pages on there. That’s all lost now. That is why I choose to self-host and use a static site generator. Once the pages in this site are generated, they don’t ever have to be touched again to remain functional. I also try to keep redirect set up when I move pages around and stuff.

I think it would have been extremely cool to find an old link to my Tripod or AngelFire pages. I may have deleted those when I started with my domain anyway. There were pages by people I knew that are long dead now that would have been neat to see. In a perfect world, search would be able to find them, but this world is far from perfect.