I spent about forty minutes last night doing something I do maybe twice a year: scrolling through the drafts folder on this blog. Right now it says 341 unpublished posts. Three hundred and forty one. Some of them are a single sentence. Some are just a link and the word "thoughts?" typed to nobody. One, dated sometime in 2013 based on the file metadata, is titled "why RSS still matters" and has no body text at all, just the title, sitting there for thirteen years like an IOU I never cashed.
I dont know why I went looking last night specifically. I think it was because I'd just finished migrating this site's backend for the third time since 2011 (dont ask, its a long story involving a hosting provider that emailed me a "sunset notice" with eleven days notice) and the migration script spit out a count of total posts, published and unpublished, and the number surprised me. I'd guessed maybe 60 abandoned drafts over fifteen years. Not 341.
What's actually in there
Mostly its dead ends. A draft from 2014 arguing that tablets were going to replace laptops for "at least 60% of knowledge workers within five years" — reader, they did not. A half-finished rant from 2017 about a chat app redesign that made me so mad I apparently needed three paragraphs to get it out of my system before deciding it wasnt worth publishing. A 2021 draft that's just a screenshot and the caption "remember this" with no other context, and I genuinely cannot tell you what the screenshot is a screenshot of anymore because the image link rotted years ago.
But some of them are good, or at least good enough that I dont know why I sat on them. There's one from early 2019, fully written, about how I switched my whole note-taking system to plain text files in a folder and never looked back, and its better writing than half the stuff I actually shipped that year. I have no memory of chickening out on it. Maybe I just forgot it existed, which is its own kind of answer.
I think the honest reason the pile got this big is that publishing something on a blog thats been running since November 2011 comes with a specific kind of pressure that a brand new blog doesnt have. Fifteen years of archive means fifteen years of me, at different ages, with different opinions, all still sitting there searchable. Writing a new post means it goes on the shelf next to the me from 2012 who thought Google+ was going to matter. Some days that pressure is fine, its just what having an archive means. Other days it makes me draft something at 11pm, reread it at 11:15, and quietly close the tab.
I'm not going to "fix" this
I briefly considered doing the productive-blogger thing where you go back and either finish or delete every old draft, treat it like an inbox-zero project. I got through maybe six of them before I gave up. Deleting a half-formed thought I had eight years ago feels weirder than it should, like throwing away a notebook. I'm just going to leave the folder alone, mostly, and maybe finish one or two of the ones that still hold up when the mood strikes. The RSS one from 2013 is staying dead though. RSS does still matter, for the four of you reading this in a feed reader right now, hi, but I no longer remember what I was so worked up about arguing.
Anyway. The site migration itself went fine in the end, aside from an afternoon where every image on this domain was 404ing and I was convinced I'd nuked years of uploads. Turned out to be a caching header issue on the new host, fixed with one config line, and I aged about two years in the ninety minutes it took me to find that line. Backups exist. They always exist. I just like to scare myself first.
If you keep a blog, or used to, go look at your own drafts folder. I bet the number is bigger than you think too.