Digging Through the Digital Past
So, the other day, I got this sudden urge to tidy up my digital storage. You know how it is, folders inside folders, backups of backups, stuff scattered across old hard drives and cloud accounts. Felt like it was time to face the mess.
I started by grabbing an old external drive, one I hadn’t plugged in for maybe five, six years? Had to hunt down the right power cable first, which took longer than I’d like to admit. Finally got it spinning, and wow, it was like opening a time capsule. Folders named things like ‘Final Project_REALLY FINAL_v3’ and ‘Random Ideas Backup’. A real trip down memory lane.
I decided to actually open some of this stuff, not just look at the file names. Found a folder simply labeled ‘Website_Old’. Curiosity got the better of me. Inside were files for a personal site I’d built ages ago. Remembered spending hours on that thing.
Getting it to even display was a small adventure:
- First, just double-clicking the HTML files kinda worked, but all the images were broken links, and the styling was all over the place.
- Realized I probably needed to run it on a local server, like I used to. Dug around for my old XAMPP installer. Found one, installed it, but it conflicted with something newer I had running. Typical.
- Spent about an hour sorting out port conflicts and getting Apache to actually start. Felt like I was wrestling with ghosts in the machine.
Finally, I got the old site sort of running locally. And man, it was… something. The design choices! The code! Looking at the source code was a mix of horror and amusement. Things I thought were so clever back then just looked clumsy now. Lots of messy bits, stuff I wouldn’t dream of doing today. Found comments I’d left myself that made absolutely no sense anymore. Like, what was I thinking?
It wasn’t all bad, though. Stumbled upon a small image gallery script I’d written from scratch. It was basic, sure, but it actually still worked pretty decently. Gave myself a little mental pat on the back for that one. Even found some old writing, drafts of articles or stories I’d completely forgotten about.
Spent most of the afternoon just clicking around, exploring these digital ruins. Didn’t really ‘achieve’ much in terms of organizing, but it was strangely satisfying. It’s wild to see the actual evidence of how you’ve grown, or at least, changed. You see the dead ends you went down, the things you struggled with, and the things you were proud of back then.
It’s a good reminder, honestly. Shows you the journey. Sometimes you gotta look back at the old works, the rough drafts, to appreciate where you are now. Didn’t clean up as much as I planned, but the detour was worth it. Now, about those other five hard drives…
