The Last Ditch by Tom Paine

Thanks to the “Happiness Engineers” of WordPress who fixed (and improved) their TypePad import tool, the entire back catalogue of The Last Ditch has now safely arrived here.

Many individual photos have been successfully imported. I was not expecting that, based on what I had read. I think that was helped by the fact that I owned my own domain. Some imports have failed and those images will disappear at the end of the month unless I retrieve and re-import them, one by one.

That’s a lot of work given there’s nineteen years of content here.

Photo galleries consistently do not import. Links to the photos in them all still point to my soon-to-be-deleted library back at TypePad. I do have all the images in a massive export file (20gb, compressed). Finding them to import here will be difficult however once the old site is no longer available as a visual reference.

Most images don’t matter much. However, it would be sad to lose those from my travel posts. This is especially true for the Great American Road Trip of 2013. I will work through those posts before the end of September and fix them if I can.

There were many dead links anyway. That’s made worse now by my habit of linking to my own old posts. Those links will still point to the dead site. For example, my recent post Credo 2 links back to Credo in October 2006. I will fix such links as I find them or as you point them out to me.

I doubt the site will long survive my own demise. My daughters are not fans. At one point back in the Golden Age, the British Library asked permission to archive my posts. They had selected this site as one future historians might find interesting. I am not sure if that’s still true, but hey. There’s little original thought here. I have never said anything not said better by the giants of classical liberalism whose ideas I follow. For as long as I am around, at least, the archive is now here.

Thank you to those of you who have been reading for the last twenty years. You have followed me at Blogger, TypePad, and now here. Thanks especially to those of you who have taken the time to comment. My worst defect as a blogger is a trenchant tone. It seems to discourage debate. I have learned a lot from those of you who have ignored that. You have helped me to reconsider my own thoughts.

This whole exercise has reminded me how much this blog has meant to me. I aim to make more regular posts and hope you’ll join in the discussion. We live in those interesting times mentioned in the famous Chinese curse, but hope springs eternal. The title of the blog was always a bit pessimistic, I suppose. The idea was of dying in Liberty’s last ditch. We have a civilisation to save. Despite all the losses we’ve suffered in the last twenty years, we may have more grounds for optimism than when I began.