Quite a long time ago, I had a recipe blog. Today, I thought about getting my old content back and setting it up again.
Rewinding a little, I had a vegan recipe blog around ten years ago. It was quite a chaotic but fun time for me personally, I had started it shortly before becoming pregnant with our first child, and I’m not really one of those supermoms, I was more in the rest when I can and have a cup of tea occasionally because I was so tired from caring for a small human. The blog was still going, and even contributed to occasionally, after our second child was born, around the time that we relocated our family from Vancouver to one of the Discovery Islands, it was a huge change and being so busy with two babies, so I didn’t blog much anymore. Eventually, my domain name expired and was lost because the registrar I was using at the time needed resellers to pre-pay their balance, and didn’t have a auto re-bill policy and I was busy so I didn’t look at my business’ email all that often, so that was that, it looks like it went offline in 2015..
The domain itself had pretty good keywords in it, but it was a dot org domain, which it isn’t really the greatest for recipe blog purposes. I have a better domain name now, which I acquired from GoDaddy’s domain auctions (sponsored link).
Getting my content back
There’s a (free!) web archive that saves millions / billions of pages, called the Internet Wayback Machine. It doesn’t index sites all that often, but it takes a snapshot of sites when it does, in order to archive them. I used this resource to rescue what I could of my old recipes. I found a few of general lifestyle articles that I’d written, along with the 15/17 of my recipes, which is a nice start for relaunching a similar recipe blog. The old site doesn’t have any link juice or social media presence, aside from an ancient Facebook page that I’d set up, which had garnered 17 followers. At least these things give me some leverage to set things up again and a little content that I can start posting. It said that I had 643 URLS archived, but it looks like a lot of it was p0st spam. It looks like the site was probably exploited at some point to have some spam posts, a problem that is sadly quite common to WordPress sites left to languish without updates.
Refreshing the look
The blog is changing names, and so the branding needs to be updated, a task I haven’t tackled yet. Luckily, I’m still fairly happy with the look of the logo I created for it, I love it when older work still holds up after many years! I think the rebrand will be designed along similar visual principles, it had a retro / mid-century housewife vibe, and I can lean all the way into that. The photos I had were less than I’m currently capable of, suffice it to say, so I think I’ll be remaking the recipes to test them and photograph them again.
Next steps
I have some work to do on this one, but I have a domain ready for this content so I just have to set up a new WordPress site, copy the articles that I’d saved over from Notion (sponsored), which I honestly find easier than importing / exporting due to the spam posts and not having access to the admin, because I’m just grabbing content from the web pages of my old site.
