1 May 2025

Our new search page for the blog archive

Nominally, I’ve been reading A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James. I’ve made some progress, but in reality, my time has been sucked away by a new search page I’ve been designing for old blog posts that I keep. The blog page has been maintained since June 2018 when someone commented that there was no About page or blog on the website. I was just trying to make things work at that time and get some reviews up, but I swiftly created those pages, and since then I archive blog posts at the end of each month.

Of course, the list of pages has been growing since then and whenever I have wanted to look back at an old post it can take some time to find it. Things are usually much further in the past than I realise. The list of dates that linked to the pages was useless, and there seemed no use keeping old blogs if I, or anyone else, couldn’t easily search them.

So, I’ve spent over a week trying to get the page together. A lot of the problem has been that any changes I have made to Neocities since I started have been taking hours to register, so it takes so much longer to get anything done: that, and the enormous amount of information I had to arrange and data entry I had to do for the whole thing to work.

About halfway through I wondered if the time I was spending was worth it. But sunk costs played heavily on my mind, so I kept going. I’ve spent all this morning, starting at 6:45, to finish the data entry so I could finally put it behind me. I felt really good when I finished. I went and had lunch. Then I realised that it was the first of the month today. Time to archive more blog posts! But this time I would have to create entries for the new search table, too!

The search page for the blog archive can be found under ‘Blog’ in the menu bar. The link replaces the long list of dates that were previously there. Have a play with it if you want. If you’re a former or recent contributor to the website, you’re bound to find an entry that features you.

If anyone finds mistakes or has suggestions for improvements, I sure would appreciate hearing about it. I’ll get to those as soon as I can. But not today. For the rest of the day, I don’t want to look at my computer!

- bikerbuddy