Hi Folks, I Know It’s Been Awhile . . .

So welcome to my new website! As many of you already know, Breadwerx has been offline for some time now. I don’t want to bore you with details, but I feel like I should at least provide you with a brief explanation of what’s been going on.

Basically, my old website had suffered from neglect for much too long. I can be a bit of a slacker at times, and I had neither uploaded new content nor updated my website in several years (almost 5 years, to be more precise). Eventually — and at no great surprise — all the little glitches and technical issues that arise from time to time piled up into one big problem that was too complicated for me and my limited technical abilities to figure out.

Breadwerx crashed and I couldn’t get it back up and running again.

When it came time to renew the hosting for my site, I couldn’t justify paying good money to keep a website that was no longer working. So I let it expire and that was the end of it. Well, sort of . . .

Waaaaaay back in the day (circa 2012), I had read an article which made a good case for the notion that folks should purchase the internet domain of their name — even if they had no plans to start a website with it anytime soon. It made sense to me, so that’s exactly what I did. I figured one day I might use it to aggregate all my various interests into a single website (I do have other interests besides just bread, if you can believe that). And I’ve been sitting on it ever since.

Well, turns out maybe that was a good idea after all, because here we are! Since I already owned the domain, it made sense that I simply create a new site under this domain and migrate all my old content over here. Seemed reasonable to me — and I know it sounds good in theory — but as we all know, theory and practice are often two different things.

The problem is that when I let my old website expire, all my access to the backend content disappeared with it. That’s probably not a problem for responsible website owners who religiously backup all their content, but a “responsible website owner” is not something I’ve ever been (and may never be, for that matter).

The online version of my content was gone, and even though I still had all the original article drafts, the thought of going through all that material to re-edit it and put it back together into posts again just seemed like a giant time-sink. And a large part of the content of my old website could be found in the comment section — I didn’t want to lose all that history. So I took a different tack . . .

I copied all my old content from the snapshots found on the Wayback Machine. For those who don’t know, the Wayback Machine (the Internet Archive) is basically the memory of the internet. You can pick any date from a website’s existence and revisit how it looked on that day — kind of a fun distraction when you’ve had a few. The catch is that the Wayback Machine only takes snapshots — and not necessarily every single day.

So I could only copy content from days that the Wayback Machine had taken a snapshot. And unfortunately, that wasn’t too often with my little ol’ backwater website. Even worse, the snapshots that it did take weren’t always complete. I thought I’d just be able to copy all the content from the last day that the Wayback Machine took a snapshot, but no, that would be too easy. Turns out that I had to dig around through years of snapshots before I could open up and copy all the articles. Naturally, many of the comments that came during the later years of my website’s existence couldn’t be accessed — they’ve been lost, and that’s a shame.

I’ve salvaged what I can, but it ain’t pretty. Most of the old links that connected my articles to each other — and to the greater online community — are broken. And frankly, I don’t feel the need to spend the required time putting them back together. All the old comments can be read, but they are no longer interactive — they are now just part of the history.

In short, it is what it is.

What matters to me is that the content is here and can be accessed. I’ve redirected the links in my old Youtube videos to point here now. The important information is available once again. I’ve categorized all those old posts as “Breadwerx Archive“. They reflect a meaningful past to me . . . but a past all the same.

And that brings me to the here and now. What can you expect from this new website? Well, I certainly intend to begin creating new content once again. But if you’ve followed me for any length of time, you’ll know that I can be rather sporadic in my output. So I won’t pretend that I’m gonna become some hyper-productive content-generating machine. Probably not gonna happen.

Instead, what I can say with much more surety is that I don’t intend to let this site go dormant as I did with Breadwerx. It’s a new day and age — much has changed since Breadwerx was just my own little anonymous corner of the internet. The baking community has grown beyond measure — many new voices have risen to share their own insights and opinions. It’s no longer the tiny niche community it used to be. And I’m not quite sure where I fit in to this new environment. If I’m being honest, I’m not even sure how well I fit into the old environment. But still, I want to contribute what I feel I can contribute . . .

As best I can.

Cheers!

Trevor