I'm bringing back my old blog posts

I always feel embarrassed when I go back and read my old write ups. They are simply outdated and shows a version of myself who is way more stupid that I'm now. That makes me sick. So whenever I add more content to my website or rewrite its backend from scratch(which happens once or twice a year :P) I will just mercilessly delete my old posts. This has been going on since I started writing on Blogger (anyone still using it?).

But this time I'm changing this behaviour. I'm bringing back my old stuff. But not all of them. When I started blogging I had written so many click-bailty articles to drive traffic for AdSense. I didn't include them in this process. Simply because they were not written to speak out myself. Their target was to get people to read and subscribe to my blog.

Almost every typical Indian blogger does this. Unsustainable struggle to stand on oneself. If you are poor and are starting from scratch this might seem like an obvious way to make money. But once you start doing something for someone else without expectations, simply because it is the right thing to do and it has to be done, that will transform you into something unreal.

Almost all the imported articles are basically stuff I wrote for my friends in college and facebook. Some of them are not really valid now. Some of the links are broken. I had a series of posts introducing Android development to beginners. I rewrote all of them in Malayalam as well. That was written on request from a friend of mine. He had zero knowledge about it. So I had to explain things like I was explaining to a 5 year old. It was difficult. After writing a sentence I will think whether he will understand this. If that is a negative I try to simplify that again.

I do the same thing while I give workshops. But it is easy there because you will get an immediate feedback if the attendees didn't understand the thing I just said. Their facial expression might change, some people ask to the person sitting next, some curious people ask me right away for clarification. The communication is faster there. But if you write that in a blog post you have to wait until people read it and write comments on it to get feedback.

Some of the articles are just every day tricks. One of them introduces browser's inspector window to get the link of the currently playing video. I had wrote about couple of Windows utilities I built. One is a tool that just turns off laptop displays on execution so that you can save some battery without putting it on sleep. Another one listens to keyboard events in background and lets you assign any actions to any key combos. A few other posts are about my dictionary app Artham, which I built for my dad and became a life changing project to me.

So yeah, basically they are old, mostly useless. But I'm keeping them in my blog. I want to see how much I have progressed through these years. They tell me that I have done well and will inspire me to do more, write often and spread some love!