Choosing what old posts to migrate and preserve
I’ve mostly finished with my project to move selected posts over from my old Squarespace site, Sketchbook B. I’ve been working on this off and on since 2024.
Squarespace export is pretty rough, so it was a very manual process. It includes a bunch of random javascript and junk in a Wordpress format that makes clean import difficult. Recently I changed my approach and used Python to scrape my old site and create Markdown files for each post. Micro.Blog then takes a ZIP archive of .md files and converts them into posts, finding the links and moving them over. It worked reasonably well. I had three total pages where Micro.Blog struggled to move the images over.1 And I had to rebuild the site a couple of times. But now, I have 170+ old posts dating back to 2008. Pretty much every post and picture I care about lives on bobwertz.com.
So what did I choose to leave behind? I didn’t move InDesign tips from 2012. They got a lot of traffic on my old site, but I’m not interested in being an Adobe expert anymore and they’d have to be updated to be useful. I dropped a bunch of random link posts, mostly because the links were broken. I went through a phase where I wrote about my favorite gear, but again, most of those links are broken and the reviews weren’t extensive. I kept a few. I dropped anything about how I was changing or redesigning the site. When in doubt, I aired on the side of preserving the post.
There is one other section of my old site to move… I have years of microblog posts on Sketchbook B. From 2017-2022, my original microblogging setup was connected to my Squarespace blog, which would then crosspost from Micro.Blog to Twitter and Facebook.2 I deleted them from Micro.Blog when I rebooted everything in 2022 — dumb mistake. Much of this is already captured in my Twitter archive, so I’m not too worried about it, but I would like to move some of them over. Once I decide how to handle it, I’ll be ready to pull the plug on my Squarespace hosting plan (and the accompanying monthly charge).
I also need to figure out how to handle my sketchbookb.com domain name. Do I just redirect it to one of my domains? Or maybe I’ll just create a simple new page with links to both sites. I need to think that through for a little bit. I am going to try and use Cloudflare to redirect links so they aren’t broken. We’ll see how that goes.
Bob Wertz is a type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.