This is an archive of my old blogs. Two of them, actually.
nicholasperkins.com (2008 to 2009)
My first blog. I started it in December 2008 because I had opinions about internet censorship and wanted somewhere to put them.
At the time, the Australian government was pushing a mandatory internet filter called the “Clean Feed”. I was pretty fired up about it. So I wrote about that, plus some other things: atheism, Queensland politics, gay rights, the occasional bit of everyday life.
I wasn’t a software engineer yet. I was working in the public sector, doing financial administration. But I was spending more and more time on the internet, and I wanted to be part of the conversation.
The blog ran for about a year. 40 posts. Then I stopped.
nicholosophy.com (2010 to 2017)
My second blog. I started it in August 2010 with a post called “Why so many blogs, Mr Perkins?” - which was me asking myself why I kept starting blogs and then abandoning them.
This one stuck for longer. Seven years, 67 posts. It became the place where I wrote about fat acceptance, mental health, diabetes, and whatever else was on my mind. It’s where I found my voice as a writer, even if I didn’t know it at the time.
The blog changed direction a few times over the years. It started as general social commentary, drifted into fat acceptance and body politics, then shifted toward mental health and leadership. The last post is from February 2017. After that I redirected the domain and moved on to other things.
How I built this archive
Both blogs are long gone. The domains expired, the WordPress installs are dead, and I don’t have backups. But the Wayback Machine had been quietly archiving them the whole time.
I used the Wayback Machine’s CDX API to find every snapshot it had taken of both sites. That gave me a list of URLs and timestamps going back to 2008. The CDX API is essentially an index of every page the Wayback Machine has ever crawled, and you can query it for any domain.
The interesting thing is that the CDX index alone missed 11 posts. Some pages were never directly archived. But the RSS feeds were, and WordPress RSS feeds include the full post content in a field called content:encoded. So I pulled every RSS feed snapshot the Wayback Machine had, parsed the XML, and extracted the complete post content from there.
That worked for 54 of the nicholosophy posts. For the older nicholasperkins posts, the RSS feeds only had comments, not full post content. But the Wayback Machine had captured the actual HTML pages for 32 of those posts, so I fetched those directly and extracted the content from the page HTML.
For 12 posts, I only have the title. The Wayback Machine never captured the content at all. I found the titles by looking at archived tag pages and date archive pages, which listed all the posts with links, even though the linked pages themselves were never archived.
I also tried to recover all the images. 35 content images were referenced across all the posts. I fetched each one from the Wayback Machine with a script that paused between requests so I wasn’t hammering their servers. 25 of them came back. 11 were never archived at all - the Wayback Machine crawled the pages that referenced them but never fetched the image files themselves. Where an image is missing, you’ll see a note saying so.
What’s here
107 posts in total. 95 with full content, 12 with titles only. 25 images recovered, 11 lost. Everything is preserved as originally written, typos and all.
Some links might be broken. I rewrote internal links to point within this archive where I could, but external links go to their original URLs, which may or may not still exist.