I’m enjoying my new “On This Day” page. As I mentioned before, I’m borrowing Jamie’s blog gardening idea and trying to enhance it. I want to import blog posts from my old blog into my new one.

This is not so simple. It requires I “schedule” posts from the past, which is a crude workaround, as it’s not meant to work this way.

I have to be careful and make sure I put in the date correctly, or the post will default to the present day. If I mess up, I need to change the date of the post to the past, which does not move the current post but duplicates it to the past date I specified instead. I am left with a copy of the post in the present day, which I cannot edit or delete unless I rebuild the blog.

For example, a few days ago, I brought back a post about scripting in Bash. It needs work. The markdown contains a few formatting errors, not to mention a healthy dose of typos and poor choice of words I wouldn’t use today.

I wasn’t careful enough and published it immaturely. Instead of receiving the datestamp from 2019, it was posted on September 1, 2024. I tried to correct this and change the date back to 2019. This created a duplicate post on that date while leaving the original post in 2024. The 2024 post showed on my Mastodon feed, and people commented on it, thinking it was from a few days ago (as they should, since It had the date of September 1, 2024). Back on Micro.blog’s backend, I could only see the post from 2019, the same one in the link above. The duplicate post from 2024 was not there, so I couldn’t edit or delete it.

The solution to removing that “ghost” post was to rebuild the blog on the backend. I think of this option as pressing “reset” on my blog. This fixed the issue. The ghost post disappeared, but it took the comments with it.

Now, I only have the correct post, the one from 2019, and I have a draft with corrections (it’s a long one!). If you comment on this post, it should be fine once I update it. I would wait though; there are a few corrections I need to put into place, including broken links and weird formatting issues.