Anyone that provides regular new content to their web site eventually runs into the question of what they should do with older content.
I’m not talking about event notices from 2015 or employment notices from 2021. Those are clear public hides, if not sheer deletes, from your public web site. It’s okay to archive everything but clearly there can be content that doesn’t need to be public anymore because the content has absolutely no imaginable value now.
But what about the stuff that has some dated information, but some that could be of value for historical purposes and some that still has value for some of today’s users?
That’s when we have to edit that content for re-purposing. And if you’re like me, this is one of the things you are least likely to prioritize. After all, the content is there, and if a person really wants to see it, they’ll find it, right?
Wrong. It’s buried. We’re all busy, we let Google determine a lot of our priorities’ results. And Google says it is buried, and it is.
I have 265 posts that are public now on this site for public information purposes stretching back to 2010. Hardly any of them are viewed anymore. In the past I’ve deleted the obviously non-essential posts but that only gave me the illusion of doing something, by removing something that nobody saw anyways. The real work is to re-purpose what I think still has value, and then dump the rest. I’ve decided to make that a goal for this site this year, so there will be some re-usage showing up here in the future.
And there will be a lot moved to draft.