For more than five years now, Tom and I have had (nominally) weekly calls. Every Tuesday morning, we meet to chat about work and life. These started as calls to work on Get Rich Slowly, but because neither of us was wholly motivated to do that work, they eventually evolved into general bullshit sessions.

Lately, though, that’s changed.

I sold Get Rich Slowly to Tom in May. We’d both kind of been treading water for a few months, but the end of the year has lit a fire under our butts. I have a couple of big GRS-related expenses coming up at the end of December, and I don’t want to have to pay them. Plus, I’m in a temporary lull now that one set of art classes has ended and another is yet to begin. For four weeks, I have the time and the motivation to close down my Get Rich Slowly operations while ramping up things here at Folded Space.

As a result, Tom and I have had some of our most productive Tuesday-morning calls ever! It’s kind of hilarious how much we’re getting done, actually.

As some of you already know, I’m in the process of handing over the Get Rich Slowly mailing list to Tom. I sent out a message letting my subscribers know that my version of the mailing list is ending and inviting them to subscribe to a new (yet-to-be-launched) Folded Space mailing list.

If you want to join the upcoming Folded Space mailing list, you can sign up here. It’ll be a (nominally) weekly email containing anecdotes, links, and videos. Basically, it’ll be me sharing my favorite stuff.

Meanwhile, we’ve been shuffling around other bits and pieces behind the scene. And I’m starting a project I’ve been meaning to undertake for years: I’m beginning to consolidate all of my story-based writing here at Folded Space.

To start, though, I’m gathering everything locally on my laptop. Rather than create a huge mess here at this site — which is messy enough, I know — I’m going to create several messes on my own machine. When I’ve cleaned those up — weeks from now? months? years? — I’ll export everything here in one fell swoop.

What exactly does this mean?

• I’m going to finish my Facebook to WordPress export that I began in July. I’m about 70% done with it, and my aim is to complete the rest of it by December 15. Once that export is over, I then want to go through each and every post to massage it into WordPress format. That’s going to be a lot of work.
• I’ve exported all of my articles from the current Get Rich Slowly database and have imported them to a local WordPress install. Now I need to go through each and every post to massage them into a modern format. That’s going to be a lot of work.
• I’ve begun to export all of my articles from old Folded Space iterations and am importing them into a local WordPress install. Once that work is finished, I’ll need to go through each and every post to massage it into a modern format. That’s going to be a lot of work.
• At some point, I’ll export all of the posts I’ve made at my miscellaneous weblogs over the years. Once those exports are finished, I then want to go through each and every post to massage it into a WordPress format. That’s going to be a lot of work.

The bottom line is that this is all a lot of work. And it probably matters only to me. I know that. But I’m enthralled by the idea that one day in the not-so-distant future, everything I’ve ever written online will live at this website. (And, to be honest, I eventually want to bring in all of my offline writing too.)

One barrier that’s blocked me for years is the Great Database Crash of 2005. In October of that year — just after Hurricane Katrina — my Moveable Type database crashed, locking me out of my blog. This was the event that forced me to learn WordPress, actually. Fortunately, I didn’t lose everything I’d written before. Moveable Type was a static blog system, which means it created fixed web pages instead of creating them on the fly. When the database died, the blog content didn’t go away. Only the behind-the-scenes functionality did. I can, in theory, manually move over old articles one by one. (And that’s just what I’ve done over the years.)

This afternoon, though, I discovered something I never knew, something that might make things easier.

WordPress is capable of importing a Moveable Type mt-export.txt file. “That’s great,” I thought when I learned this, “but it means I would need to have an export file. And I don’t…Or do I?” On a hunch, I checked some old files. Sure enough, I have at least one old mt-export.txt file, and it contains the first 120 blog posts I made via Blogger and Moveable Type. Wow!

This may be the only mt-export.txt file I have sitting around. I’ve never been great at making backups. All the same, it wouldn’t surprise me if I had one or two additional export files on FTP servers or random hard drives. I’m going to make it a quest to search over the next couple of months. If I can find additional exports, it’ll make my life so much easier.

On a similar note, I realized that I might have the Get Rich Slowly backup from when I sold the site back in 2009. This is significant because it’d allow me to access the site as it existed at that moment, before the company that bought it from me went in to edit everything. I’d be able to reclaim some of my blog posts that I’d given up for dead!

Anyhow, I’m excited about pursuing this stuff. It’s all seemed like a burden and a weight for years, but now that I’m actually taking action, it seems fun. It seems doable.

p.s. I need your help! As part of this process, I want to find a good text-heavy WordPress theme to use here. I want it to be blog-y, if that makes sense. I want it to prioritize text and images (and, to some extent, YouTube embeds). It doesn’t need to have a lot of fancy modern stuff embedded into it. Two years ago — just before my cousin Nick died — I was working on creating a custom WordPress theme. I got 90% finished with it and still might try to do the rest by myself, but I’d really rather find something similar that just worked without me having to fuss with it much. So, if you have any suggestions for layouts that might work, please let me know. I’m happy to pay a premium for the perfect WordPress theme.