Awhile ago I set up a separate site for my editorials. They are copyrighted by me, and I lost some of them in a migration by Red Gate to new servers a few years ago. From 2005 and earlier, it appears that the editorials I wrote are gone, which really annoys me. It’s my fault for not saving them, and I am still hoping to track them down at some point.

That experience had me worried about trusting another IT staff with my own writings, so I started keeping a copy at https://voiceofthedba.wordpress.com/. I’ve been posting copies of the editorials there, at the same time they publish on SQLServerCentral, so I have an online backup.

However when I started, I began using the “categories” of WordPress as the “tags” that I use on SQLServerCentral. That’s not what I intended, and since this was a backup, it wasn’t until I realized that I had a few dozen menu links at the top of the page that I decided to fix it.

Since it’s a hosted service, I had to go back and manually start cleaning categories and adding tags. At the time, I had 70 editorials up there, so this wasn’t a pleasant process. I kept it in the background, slowly working my way through old posts and fixing them. A lesson to be learned here, mess around with the features quickly, and fail early. Make your changes when you have 10 posts, not 70.

My plan is to also move this SQL blog over there, using the export/import features, and take advantage of a single place for the “Steve Jones” publishing world. It’s a part of cleaning up my brand publishing, and I will add it to my Modern Resume presentation as an example of how I work on my brand, while not depending on my employer.