When I switched over to the new blog theme, I made the decision to remove everything from the public webserver that was older than December 2020. I didn’t want to go through every article (there were north of 7000 blog entries) and thus I just “deleted” everything from the repo except the blog entries of the last few years. When I made the decision, these were essentially the blog entries of the last 3 years, except the blog entry about losing the fear of flying dating back to 2018. A text very important to me.
However, during this year’s spring cleaning of this blog I did an analysis on the anonymized log file of my webserver. Especially the 404 entries. Older blog entries regarding Solaris are still accessed. While you can get them via archive.org, this is a little bit unpractical. So, I still see some use for the knowledge put in those blog entries.
I discussed an idea over the weekend with two friends and I think I will start it in the next few days: Over the course of the next one or two years (there are many blog entries), I will go through all depublished blog entries explaining a Solaris feature. I will clean them up and republish them. However not by simply copy them into my repository. I will do (of course) a spellcheck on the blog entries and check if my examples still work. Of course, a significant number of blog entries won’t come back. For example, the tutorial about SamFS or AVS.I don’t think there is any use for them today. The criteria for republication will be: Does it work with most current Solaris 11.4 SRU at the time of re-publication? Perhaps some blog entries about troubleshooting will reappear, too.
As this is a side project for idle evenings this will take quite a while, probably more than the mentioned 2 years. I will start with newest blog entry and work down until the start of the blog. New entries about new features have priority of course
What do you think about this? Useful? Unnecessary?
My suggestion is that criteria could be a bit different: does a topic/feature/issue in a post would be relevant for Solaris-derivatives (OmniOS, SmartOS, OpenIndiana, etc) too.
It makes it a [somewhat/significantly] more complicated, but it's likely the origin of the audience for such posts: not a person with Solaris box and an access to Solaris knowledgebase hold by Oracle, but all newcomers without such.
Generally, removing documentation from the internet is a bad move.. yes I can use archive.org, but that requires me knowing that this info existed on your site before. At some point, your then-defunct links will age out of Google, and full-text search on Archive is clunky and slow.
Can't you keep e.g. a plain-text dump of the content somewhere?
