I’m not very good yet (though I have a few posts in the pipeline that may be readable) so i wouldnt mind the chance to go back and touch up those (magazine style entries) that werent quite right.

I can certainly understand sweeping a collection of posts. The benefit of 20/20 hindsight always adds a bunch of perspective.

On the other hand, I find going through a blog, flaws and all, keeps it more personable. Also:
1. One man’s garbage is another’s treasure
2. The progression in quality is a reminder of how far you’ve come
3. Maybe some day Mike Brady’s perm will come back in style

Personally, I used to manage some knowledge systems and it sucked trying to police them. On one hand, garbage in, garbage out. On the other, I found it more effective to spend more time surfacing up the good stuff vs. trying to supress or sweep the bad. Mostly I didn’t like the mindset that happened when I reached a “clean” state. I then found it tough to add to the system because my bar would get too high.

Maybe instead of deleting old posts, a better technique is to tune them? For example, I have a bunch of old posts that when I port to my new blog, I’d like to sweep and add relevant pictures and improve some of the style.

The problem with my blog starts with the very essence of Leo’s first question: to determine what the message is you want to send with your blog. There’s several, and that’s probably not a good thing. The message I’m sending differs per post. My blog is in Dutch, so I won’t bother giving examples here, but I’ll try to explain. :-)

Some are just “maintenance messages”, e.g. informing the reader about a new layout and an explanation of what motivated me to change the things I did. These are hardly relevant nor interesting for anyone by now, since the “new” layout from 2002 has been replaced itself. Already I’d hidden some of these posts (made them “private”), as they only have potential value to me, and I’ve decided that this is what I’ll be continuing to do with these kind of posts.

Others are what I used to call “ruminations”: things I felt or thought about things going on in my life, the country I live (the Netherlands) or the Internet even. These are pieces that I’ll probably leave untouched (maybe correct some bad spelling), but most important: never considered trashing in the first place. I agree that this is a piece of my history (Laura Moncur) and I like it to stay online.

Then there’s the “various other”. Uttering my frustration about how public transport fails to function day after day, ranting about someone stealing my layout (both seriously frustrating at the time, but rather useless from the readers perspective). And off course “linkdumps”, short articles referring to some other site, e.g. a column I liked, and a short explanation why it’s worth checking that out or my personal vision on the subject the column is about.

For both of these kinds, I very much share J.L. Munn’s approach. By know, I’ve figured out that I try give my readers a good and amusing read on my vision and experiences, and therefore quality content (of whatever kind, subject, and level of usefulness that may be). So some of those articles will remain, but some I’ll remove since I don’t think the offer the quality and/or amusement I pursue to deliver.

And for the ones that do withstand my high standards: yes, I think old articles are an *extra* fun read (Barbex). And again, there’s no reason not to preserve my share in history.

As for preserving history, keeping things available is something that I’ve always taken very serious over time. I even have a script in place that catches any request for an old URL’s (including old domains and subdomains I’ve used – which I’ve kept active), analyzes the full URL, translates it to the current deeplink in my archives and finally forwards the user with a nice “301 – moved permanently” header. There’s probably no way I can take this more seriously. ;-)

Anyway, thanks everyone for your replies and opinions, I hope the general concession I’ve extracted from it, is just as helpful to others.

Just imagine going over the old posts in 15 years, all the memories! Don’t delete those memories, move them to an archive or just start a new blog and keep the old one locked down.