Back on that date, brevity reigned supreme: an exceedingly short statement paired with an animated GIF, spinning away to beat what was clearly a proper scorcher. In honour of that past brevity, I shall follow in a similar manner.
The Lower Mainland turned in a dignified 18°C. It was a mild early-autumn afternoon where no fans or mechanical intervention were needed to stir the air. Here's a 3:45 PM shot from the balcony looking east up the Fraser River.
At the time, Blogger had only just been acquired from Pyra Labs by a young, ambitious outfit called Google. In internet years, two decades is several geologic epochs. Yet despite Google's legendary habit of sending beloved products to the corporate graveyard, Blogger is still quietly running the machinery in the background.
The surrounding scaffolding, headers, and fonts have evolved over the last twenty-three years, but the core text remains untouched. More than two decades later, the words typed on a winter morning in 2003 sit exactly where they were put, still chronicling the road east over the Rockies.
At the bottom of most blog posts here, you'll see a few tags. These are a way of categorizing entries for later viewing. I ran a test of 'Canada Day' mainly because I included 13 photos in yesterday's post and wanted to see prior years.
My blog goes back to 2003, so I've been active with this project for nineteen years! However, I have a cache of photos that no longer are on my personal web server. As a consequence, many posts from 2005 to 2009 are missing photos.
These images are not really gone, but I have to edit each entry to put them back into place. It's extremely time-consuming to edit each entry one by one. I sometimes enjoy busy work though. I think that stems from the large amounts of prep time required when getting ready for classes when I was teaching.
Interestingly, I did a few more today just so that my Canada Day tag will show posts all the way back to 2004. If you click the photo below from 2009, you will load this blog post and many others referencing CANADA DAY. (As the results will not fit on a single page, in the mid-point one must click 'older posts' in the footer to continue.)
Before last weekend's trip to Winnipeg, I got a surprise email from Ria Renouf. She is presently organizing a local news site called, New West Anchor. She asked if I'd be willing to have an interview about this blog. As I have never ever declined an opportunity to talk about myself, I eagerly agreed.
She stopped at the apartment today while Jay was at the community center in Burnaby. We had a very personable chat and talked a lot about New Westminster.
We discussed the view from our balcony because Jay and I have seen two dozen years of changes in our view of downtown and the Fraser River. There are plenty of posts mentioning our balcony. Here's an example from 2006: My Most Precious 5 x 14 Feet. Oh and here's an image from the year before that!
For around fourteen years, this blog has had an option for anyone to receive an automated email of new posts. Over the years this function has become increasingly less important. For example, I post a daily link to my Facebook feed highlighting each post. More things happen through social media in today's world.
I just received notification from Google that they will be shuttering the emailing service from their Feedburner functions although the RSS will continue. my eJournal and images - Daily Since 2003 - powered by FeedBurner .
The total number of my active email recipients stands at a couple of dozen. I am sorry to say that if you are presently one of those readers, you'll soon no longer receive my eJournal and images by email.
https://dennissylvesterhurd.blogspot.com/2006/02/did-you-hear-one-about.html
This is an example post with an image never hosted by Google. I originally used to run on my own server when that was an option. The image still points to a personal domain.
1) Is this a real proxy and if so is the image permanently cached by Google?
2) Will Google maintain this image if I abandon the personal domain it used to load from?
I have been meaning to move old images off the personal domain site as for years and years I've been embedding from Flickr. Now it'd be tough as copying just provides 'unnamed' as the jpg name.
I'm hoping that when I shut down my old domain, the images will stay available. I've only missed a few days of blogging since 2003 and wish to maintain the years between 2004 and 2008 hasslefree.
Gold Product Expert
Nigel ( @stwNigel )
Hi Dennis S. Hurd ,
Good observation.
Yes. Blogger does cache the images linked in Blogger blogs.
You can test it live by adding image from external domain to the HTML or Image gadget on Blogger. You will see the rendered image will be served from googleusercontent.com.
It is unlikely that Google will store the image permanently especially since they do not provide a way to manage images hosted from googleusercontent.com. So it is very possible that they will automatically refresh the cache at some point and URLs of image loaded from googleusercontent may change over time.
So I suggest you yo backup the images in the personal domain.
Best,
Nigel
Thank you for taking the time to answer my message.
I had sort of hoped to hear that these images would remain indefinitely as they form a crucial part of my blog. I would feel bad knowing a half-decade of posts might suddenly start loading without images.
I have backup copies of the very old images but having to re-edit each and every reference inside each post would prove too arduous even for someone with a lot of time on their hands. My naming convention used to be mmddyy.jpg which was not smart as it makes grouping them in any logical order hard too.
Freshly copying a month at a time used to be easy as I could save the images presented when viewing the blog by simply 'copying' from the screen. Now, of course, they come back with names 'unnamed (1) jpg etc.
Sigh. If you ever learn more about the way content such as this will be handled, I'd love to be informed.
Again, thanks.
