Twenty-Seven Years of Writing on the Web

Between July 1 and September 14, the eighth most-viewed page on narendranag.com was “Page Not Found.” It accounted for 3.18% of all views. So, I got Claude to check. All 21 dead addresses people were landing on came from outside, from links to versions of this site that no longer exist.

Some of those addresses ended in .php, which dates them to the WordPress years. Some were bare slugs from a later theme. Following them back turned into an excavation of every place I have published since 1999, most of which I had lost track of. Here’s what those sites looked like, recovered from the Wayback Machine, and what came back with them.

Notepad and Banner Ads

My first website lived at naren.8m.com, built using Dynamic HTML that I was learning. For a while narendranag.com simply redirected there. It was not a blog. It was a set of tutorials for people building their first sites: how FTP works, where to host, how to open a link in a new window with JavaScript, how to position layers in DHTML. The page on designing your own site notes that “most of this site has been made using Notepad!” What I’m proudest of is the alien gif I used on the front page.

It was not even the first attempt. A page on that site explains that I had earlier built a site “about me” in DHTML, and that it “went into limbo.” Nothing of it survives. What does survive is the JavaScript tutorial, which ends by asking anyone who reuses the code to “put in a line of code giving me credit.” There is also an article on marketing a website that I reprinted from a newsletter, with its author, Jim Daniels, credited.

Thinking Out Loud

In May 2004 I converted a newsletter I used to run (well, an email list) and started a blog on Blogger called ] t h i n k [. The first post shows how young I was.

Sixty posts survive from that blog, between May 2004 and April 2006. Many are a line of commentary and a link to something I had read. Others are reporting from where I was, like the run of posts from Srinagar in April 2005, beginning with Nightlife in Kashmir, written the evening the city’s traders went on strike over VAT. I was a reporter with the Hindustan Times back then, and that reporting assignment to Kashmir led to some great stories (including a massive front page story about an attack that took place while I was there).

Connecting Dots

By 2007 the blog had moved to narendranag.com, run on WordPress, and had the name it would keep for a decade: Connecting Dots. In July 2008 I wrote a post called “Dot dot dot …” to say I was leaving journalism. I had resigned from Mint to take up “connecting the dots” full time, working on business ideas and with a consulting firm. The post ends: “This blog is for fun.”

It stopped being only that in November 2008. The day after the attacks on Mumbai began, I published the first of nine posts in nine days trying to make sense of them, and the blog spent that winter on terrorism, the Indian media’s coverage of it, and the Satyam fraud. None of those pages survived with their design intact. The archive saved the words and lost the stylesheets.

The site changed shape several times. In late 2009 the homepage was a single lime-green stream of my tweets and links.

In 2010 I deleted the old blog, started over, and published a new first post that read, in full, “The Blog Is Dead. Long Live The Blog.” By early 2011 Connecting Dots was back, now laid out like a magazine, with a lead story and three columns under it.

The last posts before a long gap, in December 2012, were about the protests that followed the Delhi gang rape, including “Why I am angry, why I am protesting”. Then I stopped writing, and in June 2013 I let the domain lapse. For most of the following year narendranag.com belonged to someone else. When I got it back I wrote a post called “A Hiatus”: “Much has happened since I last wrote a post — a child, a new home, an election … I let the blog die. After the anger and the activism, I needed a break.”

Somebody Else’s Platform

From late 2015 my WordPress posts were syndicated to Medium, and before long Medium was the only place I published.

The Internet Archive has no captures of narendranag.com at all between mid-2017 and mid-2024.

Coming Home

On July 4, 2024 I rebuilt the site on Jekyll and GitHub Pages and wrote a short note about it. It says I would “spend time with Claude and ChatGPT figuring out how to find and pull in the stuff I’ve published over the years into this one place.” The first version was a plain list of posts.

This year the site took its current shape, set like a print journal. The two captures below are the same design, three months apart. The first, from June, says “Writing since 2019.” The second is today, and says “Writing since 1999.”

What the Crawler Kept

The plan in that 2024 note took two years to act on and one day to finish. I did it this week with Claude Code, and most of the work was not writing but judgement: which archived page was a post and which was a category listing, which date was the publication date and which was just when a file was uploaded, and which posts were actually mine.

This week the site went from 48 posts to 219. Nine came from naren.8m.com, 60 from ] t h i n k [, 91 from the WordPress years and 11 from Medium. Eighteen of the 21 addresses that used to return “Page Not Found” now lead somewhere. Most dates are exact, taken from the date each blog displayed. The 1999 pieces are accurate to the year and no closer.

I left some posts out. For years I reprinted other people’s work in full: Stratfor analyses, wire stories, newspaper columns, a poem. Those are not here. The one exception is the 1999 marketing article, kept with its author credited because it is part of the record of that first site. The posts that came back cleanly are the ones where I was doing the writing.

None of it survived because I kept it. Of the 171 posts, 160 exist only because the Internet Archive happened to crawl the page, often only once. The other 11 were still sitting on Medium. The hosts were free, the blog was deleted, the domain lapsed, and the platform I moved to was one I did not own. This site is now the only place all of it lives together. Finally.