Almost three years ago, I registered the domain where you’re reading this blog. Prior to that time, Patrick’s Place existed on Blogger, having moved a couple of years before that from AOL.
Ever since relocating to this domain, I added a piece of code to the top of the HTML for the Blogger site that automatically redirected people to this blog. There was also a reminder at the top of the page that things had moved. I figured that would be enough to let people know to update their links or bookmarks.
This afternoon, it occurred to me that the old Blogger sites were still there, still redirecting people here, year after year.
In the past, I never really considered deleting the old blogs. I don’t know why…maybe because I still considered those sites my “babies,” despite the fact that everything there — including the comments — is all right here, too. I also suspected that if I deleted those sites, spammers would immediately pick up the addresses, causing people intending to get to my blog to wind up on some get-rich-quick scheme or porn.
Today, I figured, it’s been almost three years now. People who haven’t updated their bookmarks by now are probably never going to. So I clicked the “delete” link on five Blogger sites I had maintained: Patrick’s Portfolio, a photoblog whose images can be seen here by clicking the Photography category; The Cross Examination, a religious-themed blog whose posts are among the earlier ones in the Religion category here; A Stop at Willoughby, a blog that focused on fiction writing; Patrick’s Weekender, the previous home of the Saturday Six and Sunday Seven; and the Blogger version of Patrick’s Place.
I had assumed that deleting those blogs — all those posts and all those comments — would take a little bit of time. It would have been nice if it had, considering all of the work and effort that went into them.
But within a second or so, they were gone. What now replaces those old sites is this simple message:
I’m glad you continue to find me here. Thanks for reading.
It’s sad, I had a Geocities site that I kept and when Yahoo closed down the sites, I felt the loss. It was like losing a little bit of my history.