People keep telling me that once something is published to the internet, it is never really lost, but you can't prove it by me. In the last 18 months or so, I upgraded both my home and my work computers. In the process, I lost two articles I wrote, despite the fact that I had multiple copies at one time. One of them had been published, first on a friend's blog and then in the Denver Post. I have a hard copy, but it's in a frame, which makes it a little difficult to retype. No worries, I think, after all, nothing is ever lost on the internet. Except when it is. Despite multiple searches, not only the Google kind but searches of numerous CD's, floppy disks (remember those?) and Zip disks (remember those?), I can't find it. So I actually took the framed version down from the wall and retyped it, and will post it when I find a suitable picture to go with it.
The other one, my infamous Twelve Steps for Parents of Teens and Young Adults, was almost published, too, as a sidebar to a parenting article, but then Columbine happened and they didn't seem quite so funny. I can probably recreate them, except now that my son is 31, the urgency just isn't quite there.
Maybe I can come up with a Twelve Steps for Wives of Engineers, instead.
But speaking of lost and found, while looking for a suitable picture for this article, I ran across an old picture of my cousins and brothers and I when we were very young. Now it's on the internet. Let's see how long it lasts.
A lot of lost stuff can be found by way of the Wayback Machine.
ReplyDeleteTRiG.
Thanks, TRiG, but I tried several snippets of text from the retyped version of the of the framed one in their search engine and nothing came up. That's a handy resource to have, though. Funny thing - after I took the framed version down from the wall and retyped it, I found an unframed version, which would have been much easier to handle while retyping. I still haven't posted it. I also found the original version I had written of the Twelve Steps.
ReplyDeleteThe other (a poem, actually) was never published anywhere and is probably lost to the ages.