They say that once you put something on the internet, it will forever be on the internet. Well, I recently found that to mostly be true.

This site has been in existence in some form for over 10 years now (not always under metts.me). I’ve never really put much into it and tend to neglect it for years at a time, but when I decided to give it a bit of a revival, I realized that all of my past content had been lost to host provider changes and failing to backup properly. I initially figured all of my content dating back to 2004 would be lost forever, but then I remembered a little something called The Wayback Machine. So I hit up the internet archive site to see what had been cached. Sure enough, I was able to pull back a lot of my old stuff (minus pics, media, and attachments). It involved a lot of copying and pasting into an XML document to import into the site, but now I have it back (well, most of it).

Reading through some of my past posts show that this site has never served a purpose, but I always come back to it if for nothing more than treating it as a hobby or project. This time is no different from a hobby perspective, but I’ve been able to automate some items in a way that wasn’t possible in the past. Using IFTTT, I’ve set up three recipes for my three “blogs”.

• Email to Words is a recipe I set up to make writing my posts for metts.words easier. This recipe looks for emails with the label words, then posts the subject as my title and body as my entry. The emails are written in plain text using Markdown.
• Flickr to Photos is a recipe I set up to automate posts to metts.photos. Any pic I upload to a certain album on Flickr gets posted on my site, simple as that. I tried using Picasa Web Albums since I upped my storage with Google and wanted to store everything there, but that became a hassle, so I also created a recipe that sends those same photos to Picasa.
• Vimeo to Videos is a recipe for metts.videos, and is very similar to my photo recipe. This one simply embeds each video I upload to Vimeo into a new post. Once I get my YouTube channel sorted out, I’ll probably toss it into the mix as well.

All of the automation took a bit of time figuring out since I refuse to give up my blogging platform of choice, MovableType (still on a free 5.2.9 pro version). The problem was that IFTTT doesn’t support it as a channel. I’ll share the workaround in a later post.

That is the state of my site regarding content for now. More to post about at a later time. In the meantime, for my super old posts, I tagged them all as old icedtrip.net.