Pruning

As I’ve been going through my projects, I’ve been needing to ask myself the question of what to get rid of.

When I rebuilt the SMACSS site, I was able to simplify a lot but also cleared out a bunch of stuff I no longer needed, such as workshop reference materials for workshops that were from six years ago.

For this site, I’ve been wanting to consolidate some content. Namely, I’ve linked to Flickr for a number of my photos. Trying to find every reference to Flickr, grab each image, upload it to my own server, and update the reference is… well, time consuming and tedious. In reality, these are images being linked from sometimes decade-old content that really isn’t relevant anymore.

Which leads me into the question of pruning old content, in general. App reviews for defunct applications and code examples for outdated frameworks feel like content that could disappear and no-one would be the wiser. And yet, there is still some charm to occasionally dig through the archives like an old photo album, reminiscing about how things used to be.

I’ve also long been a proponent of maintaining URLs. Content that I wrote twenty years ago still has the same URL to this day!

Like that old photo album, it’s time to pack away a few things into a box and tuck it away into storage. For this web site, that’ll mean backing up what I have, tossing it onto a hard drive somewhere, and—like a closing scene to an Indiana Jones movie—carted off into some storage facility.

Then I won’t feel bad about cutting off the dead branches of this site, giving room for new growth.