AI: The Writer's Archaeologist
I may lack the charming grin, wide-brimmed fedora, and trusty bullwhip of Indiana Jones.
But I definitely felt like an archaeological adventurer this week.
I recently used Codex to rebuild my personal website. As Codex was building, it pulled in old posts from my Squarespace archive from a file on my Mac, unprompted.
That got me thinking: where else could Codex look for my old posts? After all, I’ve been blogging off and on since at least 2004. There has to be old stuff out there scattered amongst the ruins of the Internet.
Turns out there was. A lot of it.
The Expedition
Finding two decades’ worth of old posts would be a tedious nightmare—I’d simply never do it. Let alone taking on all the formatting drudgery involved to get those posts onto my new site.
But Codex couldn’t wait to get started. And it had a plan.
Yes. I can search old author profiles, backlinks, archived blogrolls, redirects, domain-registration traces, and distinctive phrases from your known posts to uncover domains you no longer remember.
It immediately surfaced 11 pieces I wrote on Medium from 2014–2015. I have no recollection of posting on Medium. But I recognize the work. It also found two guest articles I wrote for Real Estate Magazine.
Then Codex informed me I had a blog on Blogspot. News to me.
Next, Codex unearthed an old site of mine called AskTheCopywriter.com. But how did Codex know it was mine?
Your own archived copy describes it as the place to visit for your marketing tips, copywriting insight, and “occasional drivel,” so this is strong first-party evidence that it was yours.
Um, ok. A little insulting, maybe, but accurate.
Then, Codex asked:
May I check Portugal’s public web archive for copies of the forgotten Blogspot and Ask the Copywriter sites that the Wayback Machine may not have preserved?
Suddenly I was nervous.
Portugal is keeping files on me. Why? What kind of files? I’ve never even visited Portugal. But Portugal, it turned out, contained riches:
This turned into the biggest find so far. The original Typepad hostname behind matttillotson.com now exposes archived post URLs that the earlier custom-domain sweep could not see … and appears to contain dozens of additional posts.
Codex continued:
May I retrieve the two archived FeedBurner feeds to recover any titles and dates absent from the page archives?
FeedBurner? Be still, my blogging heart. We had fun tech in those days.
The Recovery
In all, Codex found 81 posts that weren’t part of my new site, dating back to 2004:
- 46 posts from Typepad
- 18 from Posterous
- 6 from AskTheCopywriter.com
- 9 from Medium
- 2 from RISMedia / Real Estate Magazine
With the artifacts uncovered, it was time to move them to the museum. Codex built backdated post pages in Obsidian for each entry and shared this frustration with me:
The old Ask the Copywriter pages need a little extra character cleanup because they predate modern web encoding.
Yeah, thanks. I already knew I was blogging in the days of stone tablets. Didn’t really need the backhanded reminder.
The Reward
Is there value to finding and collecting my old writing?
Sure. First, it’s fun to find this stuff. Especially the surprises.
I love having all my writing in one place, my place, online. More than 20 years’ worth of words!
The way I see my writing has changed. I think back and wish I’d been more consistent in the early blogging days. But man, I sure did try a lot of new things. That’s worth being proud of.
As Codex explored and formatted, a memory was sparked: I did some sports blogging at a site called Palmball.com in 2005. I asked Codex to search for any posts worth saving1.
In one entry, I wrote about Leigh Montville’s excellent biography of Ted Williams. In particular, I was envious of Williams’ singular focus in life:
And it wasn’t that Williams lived to play baseball. It was that he lived to hit a baseball. No matter what went on around him … Williams knew that the center of his existence on earth was to hit a baseball.
My inner critic considered my writing scattered, intermittent, and unfocused. It left me wondering what might have been if I’d had more clarity and consistency.
But this project showed me I was never meant to write about one thing. My writing is about exploring interests and finding ways to connect ideas across them.
One of AI’s best gifts for writers is helping us see our body of work in a new light.
I learned my writing is a little like Ted Williams after all.
I’ve taken a lot of swings. And I’m not done yet.
Footnotes
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Another nine posts, making it an even 90 posts that were rescued and restored. ↩