Reformatting Old Reviews
When you just start out with blogging, doing upkeep is simple. I notice this with my (relatively) new blog Irresponsible Cactus – it’s easy to just keep everything in the same kind of format. All posts match, the archives are nearly non-existent, and I only need to tweak a few details now and then to keep everything looking neat.
On Nyx Book Reviews though, a blog which has been around for almost five years (it’s turning five in two weeks!), I have so many posts that don’t match at all. My blog layout has changed drastically throughout the last five years, I moved from Blogger to WordPress, and I basically never felt like fixing all of the broken links and strange formatting errors. When you go through my review archive, you will find all kinds of strangely formatted posts that don’t fit my current review format at all. On one hand, I kind of love seeing these extremely old posts, such as the few I highlighted in my 1000th post. It’s nostalgic to see how I blogged years ago. On the other, it might be really confusing for my readers, and my perfectionist side doesn’t like it at all that they’re not all the same.
This is what Nyx Book Reviews looked like in 2012!
To reformat or not to reformat?
I’ve considered reformatting my older reviews many times, but it’s just such a daunting task. Nyx Book Reviews has over 350 reviews right now, and probably around 200 of those need reformatting in one way or another. Is it truly worth it to work on this for hours and hours? Even worse is that many of my old reviews have broken links that go to my Blogspot address, which I had before I got my own domain. Search engines really don’t like broken links, nor do people. Maybe I should just do a few every day, working through them?
I’m really wondering how you guys handle this. Do you reformat old reviews? Why or why not? And do you mind slightly weirdly formatted posts on other blogs?
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