“Spring” Cleaning the Website

tl;dr version: I’m going to be making updates and cleaning up files on the site. This may lead to broken links in the next few days.

I’ve had a website before we called them blogs – hell, before we called them home pages. I started my site as hand edited HTML files, mostly linking to presentations I had done. When I outgrew HTML files I built my own PHP database site…then I got busy so I moved through different content management systems (TikiWIKI anyone). They got hacked, and I kept trying different flavors, until I found WordPress, and have been pretty much twisting it to my will for the past decade.

Seriously, if you have nothing better to do check out http://quartz.syr.edu/rdlankes/ in the WayBack Machine.

With all those editors (anyone remember iWeb?) came different servers. Until about 8 years ago servers I ran (Sun Servers, Apple Servers) then ones at Syracuse’s iSchool, and finally GoDaddy web hosting.

The point is, this site has been part information dissemination, and equal part Frankenstein’s Monster for experimentation. So now it has come time to do a little cleaning. Moving things from an external site into WordPress to make backups easier, killing unlinked files, and yes, possibly even jettisoning early PowerPoint files on the wonders of FTP exported to HTML from PowerPoint. My goal is to keep as much as possible (particularly early presentations and papers), but I need to get this in hand.

So, if this week you run across a dead link – wait. If next week you run across a dead link, let me know.