I spent Wednesday night doing something I've been putting off since roughly 2019: going through the drafts folder on this blog. Not the WordPress one, the actual folder: I keep a mirror of everything in a directory called techpad-drafts that I started back when I was still hosting this thing on a shared Dreamhost box. There are 214 files in there. Some of them are one sentence long. A few are just a link and the word "??" which, fourteen years later, means absolutely nothing to me.
I wasn't looking for anything in particular. My laptop's SSD is at 89% and I got tired of the little orange warning bar, so I figured I'd clear out old junk before doing anything drastic like buying a new machine I don't actually need. Instead I lost about three hours reading half-finished posts from a version of myself who apparently had way more opinions about RSS readers than I remembered.
There's a draft from January 2013 titled "why google reader shutting down doesn't matter" that I clearly abandoned about four paragraphs in, presumably because I realized halfway through that it did matter, actually, quite a lot, and I was wrong. There's one from 2016 defending a phone I can't even picture anymore (a Blackberry Priv, it turns out, because I checked). There's a 2021 draft, never published, where past-me rants for six hundred words about a browser extension that broke after an update and I never once name the extension. Just "the extension." Thanks, past me. Extremely useful for future reference.
The stuff that actually held up
A handful of the old drafts are honestly better than what I ended up publishing that same month. There's an unfinished piece comparing keyboard switches — Cherry MX Browns versus Gateron Reds, if that means anything to you — that's more careful and specific than most of the keyboard content I've put out since. I think I never finished it because I got a new keyboard halfway through writing it and the whole premise fell apart. That happens more than I'd like to admit. You start writing about a thing because you have a strong opinion, and then reality intervenes and the opinion gets complicated, and complicated opinions are harder to ship than clean ones.
I ended up deleting maybe 140 of the 214 files. Kept the rest in a folder I'm calling maybe-someday, which is a lie, we all know that folder is where drafts go to die a slower, more dignified death than outright deletion. But it felt better than just nuking everything, so.
A small complaint, since I'm here
While I was at it I tried to open a few of the oldest drafts, from like 2011 and 2012, and a bunch of them were .txt files saved out of an app called Notational Velocity that I have not had installed on any machine I own for probably eight years. They opened fine, because they're just text files, thank god for plain text. But it did make me irrationally annoyed at every note-taking app I've used since that stores things in some proprietary database blob instead of just, you know, files on disk. I will not be naming names. Okay I'll name one name: Evernote, from around 2015 to 2017, cost me a genuinely embarrassing number of notes when I finally exported everything and half of it came out mangled. Plain text markdown files in a folder synced by something boring has never once burned me. Boring wins. I should've learned this lesson faster than I did.
Anyway, the SSD situation is marginally better now. I clawed back maybe 400MB, which is nothing, laughably nothing against a drive this size, but there's something satisfying about closing that orange bar even a little. The real disk hogs turned out to be a folder of screen recordings from testing some app three years ago that I never used again and completely forgot existed. Four gigs, gone, no regrets.
If you've got a blog or even just a personal wiki that's been running a while, I'd genuinely recommend doing this once a year or so. Not for the storage space, that's a rounding error most of the time. It's more that reading your own half-finished thoughts from a decade ago is a strange kind of company. You get to disagree with yourself a little. You get to notice which arguments you'd still make and which ones embarrass you now. Most of mine, it turns out, land somewhere in between, not wrong exactly, just written by someone who hadn't figured out yet which of his opinions were actually going to matter in ten years and which ones were just noise from a specific Tuesday.
I still don't know which category this post falls into. Ask me again in 2036.