Sunday, December 3, 2023

Blog rearranging?

We are closing in on 10 years of blogging here. In March 2014, I posted three times about Tamiya's Alpine A110 1600; the build is still on a shelf and looks pretty good to be honest, in spite of the orange peel. 


The latest complete is the fiendishly complex 917K from Model Factory Hiro. Not for the faint of heart! The engine is mounted slightly crooked to the firewall, with the result that it all fits, sort of. I've come a long way, and I hope you, my faithful readers if any, have enjoyed the trip. 


But occasionally I find the search function is inadequate; I try to find a specific post and even I find it challenging sometimes. I see there are 203 builds on the shelf, some predating the blog; and I also see that there are 658 posts (including this one). So the first thing I did was to create an index in an Excel sheet. This has helped me find things. (Note the Labels at the top of the page can reduce the clutter, assuming my selection of Labels is of help).

But I also realized to what extent some kits took many years to build, with extended time on the Shelf of Doom. The Mosquito is still unfinished, having been first described in January 2017; MFH's 908/03, partner to the 917K, took close to 5 years to build. So tracking a build from start to finish has been challenging. 

I am therefore considering combing all posts about a given topic into one, so that, for instance, the 13 posts about the Mossie could be found in one location. New posts would come as edits to this 'master' post, and the others would all be deleted. 

Some cutting and pasting would be required which also leads to the possibility of copying it all to another platform, such as Microsoft Word; this would remedy my perhaps paranoid fear that Google will, one day, ditch the blogger.com platform as insufficiently profitable. This is worrisome because while I can save the blog to my home computer, it is as an XML file which includes all sorts of blogger-specific HTML code and which cannot easily be converted to something readable by humans. I'm thinking of posterity here... just in case my great-grandchildren want to read any of this. 

This will of course all take time, perhaps several months or more of on-again, off-again work. Your thoughts would be welcome.

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