Everything I have ever published on this site now sits on my Mac as 2,010 text files. The whole thing amounts to 13 megabytes – about the size of a photograph.
My oldest published piece is from June 1993 – a week’s diary for The Independent newspaper, from a summer temp job when I was the only male typist in a pool of secretaries. The most recent post is from – well, yesterday.
I did this because of a piece by Craig Mod, which came up in my RSS reader (I also get his newsletter). The line that grabbed me was his observation that LLMs are especially good at talking to databases.
Everything I have made is located in a database of a kind I’ve never previously analysed.
So today I sat in my cPanel, looked for phpMyAdmin, exported the article table as a JSON file, and wrote a small script (with Claude) to split it into one text file per published post. (Drafts and hidden posts stayed out on purpose. I only want Claude to see the public stuff.)
Then I did the same for my links, and the site’s own scaffolding.
On disk now:
- 2,010 published articles across two Textpattern installs, dating from June 1993 to August 2026.
- 188 links I have curated at various points across 29 categories. The largest categories are book-companion links, then blogging, then quotes.
- 4,085 images with their metadata.
- 50 sections, 216 categories, 87 templates, 21 page structures.
Nerdy (even nerdier!) not to self: the site is so old I needed to export twice. First, the contents up to February 2022. Then the install Julian built for me in 2022, which I have been publishing to every week ever since without needing to think about the distinct set of plumbing.
Having the corpus is not the point: that’s Very Boring Indeed. The exciting thing is what becomes possible with it: asking questions of my own past output.
Looking for patterns in what I did write, and perhaps even finding obsessions that I hadn’t even noticed – or fruitful areas of interest standing invisible between the topics I was addressing head-on. Which pieces could be brought together? Which lists have I not yet drawn up?
More as it happens.