When you have a site like mine, one which has had well over 1000 entries posted over the years, things become a bit of a mess to maintain. It isn’t just as much an issue with tagging and overall organization, but actual site resources — old images you don’t use anymore being the main issue. Even though I’m the only person creating content here, it’s still getting to be a bit much to maintain.
Now, I’m not one to just delete posts — I prefer to keep content around for whatever its worth for others, and to provide context if I ever need to refer back to an old, otherwise now pointless and dated article.
I’m sure you’ve gone to a website via some old link to a blog and found the entry sparse – the text is there, but the related images are gone, as may be other content — perhaps the formatting is ruined due to changes to a new Content Management System, or something else. The point is, the post is sitting there, abandoned, but still available. It’s like the people who wrote the entries, or run the site, don’t care!
I hate when that happens. That’s outright abandonment of a post, if you ask me, rather than an effort to archive content. It’s treating the subject matter and the text that remains as unimportant which, to that end, would be better off deleted than left to rot on the server.
Whats a site owner / content creator to do? “Archive” the posts, that’s what.
My idea is this: For my older content which no longer is of great importance, but still holds possible future value I’ll go through a process of archiving the post which will consist of the following:
- Removal of all images that are no longer necessary.
- Replacement of the “featured image” with an “ARCHIVED” image, demonstrating the archived status of the post.
- Text added to the post explaining the archived status, and stating when the post was moved to archived status.
- Possibly using a web site archival service to archive the post as it stands before this action, for whatever purpose it may be worth.
The idea is straightforward enough, and will show at least that I’ve been to the article and intentionally placed it into an archived status. It may seem absurd to spend time doing this, but it will help me to not only know for certain I’m only cleaning up images and such that are no longer in use, but also to “safely” abandon old articles. They won’t (at least, shouldn’t) get updated, edited, or otherwise changed following this, and people will know they are probably safe to ignore.
Rather than just deleting images and leaving things look more unprofessional than they already do, I’d rather it at least look like someone came in one last time and cleaned everything up properly.