Retrospective blogging

I noticed that Terence Eden is adding old posts to his blog: things that happened before he started blogging. He calls it necroposting: inserting earlier events into his blog years after they happened. He based it on an idea by John Hicks, a designer I’ve been following for years.

Blogs don’t usually work that way: you write something on a given date and that’s it. And the next thing you write automatically follows it on a later date. So blogs appear more like journals, with the content organised by the date it was posted. We’ve all become accustomed with the format and don’t really question it.

However, I think there’s value in adding these older posts, even if it breaks the accepted convention. It’s especially valuable for people writing mainly for themselves, as I do. I find it very useful going back over my blog to find a detail from years ago. If I’ve been able to add more thoughts and events after the fact, what’s wrong with that?

I don’t like the term necropost though. That’s already used on forums when a really old thread is resurrected by posting a new response years later. If I’m to adopt the idea, I’d prefer a different term—something more accurate and less colloquial.

After thinking about it for five minutes, I settled on retrospective. After all, I’ll be writing these posts retrospectively. I’ll use a tag so that they can be filtered, and each post can have a note: “This entry was added retrospectively.” which will link back here. It’s easy to automate adding the note to each relevant entry.

The only problem now is choosing good old content to add…