A couple of weeks ago, during the traditional hike with the FSFE community after SFSCON, I have strolled for a long time alongside Julian and Tobias. It was incredibly inspiring, because I never had the chance to speak so extensively (or at all, actually) with GNOME developers—the developers of the desktop environment I use for many hours everyday.
Among the many interesting topics we discussed, I brought up the conflicting feelings I have concerning old pages in my website. There are things I wrote a while ago with which I do not agree at all anymore, or they feel stupid, or I changed my mind. Should I make an effort to update the content every time? Should I keep them as they are adding a disclaimer saying that I changed my mind, or should I simply delete them?
During the walk, Tobias and Dario told me that they believed it made no sense to keep things online just for the sake of “preserving” past memories. The most blatant example is Claire Underwood. I would most definitely not be adding her to my list of favorite people, now. Should I just remove her, or add a flag in the JSON data file collecting the list of people, preventing her card to be displayed in the final HTML page? It also crossed my mind that, even if it was something I would be ashamed of, it is still part of the many naive positions I had, so it is worthy of staying there where it is.
Another thing to be noted is that a lot of content written in the Jam (or on this website in general) between 2020 and 2022 was the result of a quite obsessive quest of digitally logging and registering anything and everything about me and my life [LINK to v2], also in a failing pointless attempt of showing off. I was valuing quantity over quality, literally.
Of course, I got to the conclusion that it depends. I never had any doubt about blog posts preservation, because, as far as they could be from my identity and my thoughts right now, they always state a date, and they clearly refer to a specific date/period of my life. On the other hand, whenever I have doubts, I should just have the courage of letting go, remove obsolete content, clean things up. As this website is the virtual representation of my mind, being the editor of myself.
Therefore, contrary to most major updates and refactors, this huge update of tommi.space removes a lot of content, instead of adding it.
Practical notes
- Anything I have ever published continues to live in the [history] of the git repository (good luck navigating it).
- I make my best to track web pages whose evolution overtime has a meaning in the Wayback Machine.
- If I remember to do it, all web pages that are permanently deleted, for whatever reason, get saved to the Wayback Machine before disappearing.
- As a result of this process, I hope and I expect the website to be way less confusing, meaningless, and more focused on what actually matters.