Replanting Articles: Bring Legacy Posts to Your Website

3 weeks ago 1

Old articles and blog posts too often get removed from the web or neglected, left to rot on broken pages. Replanting lets you migrate legacy content to your current site so it can thrive again.

By Richard MacManus | October 2, 2025 | Tags: Notes

seasons

I’ve begun a new archiving project: republishing articles I wrote a long time ago, but that have since disappeared from the web or been mangled in some way (for example, the page design is outdated or the content is out of place with its new surroundings).

I’m calling this activity “replanting” — because it feels like moving a neglected plant, perhaps crowded by weeds and eaten by bugs, into a new garden, where it will be cared for and nurtured again.

Of course, I’m borrowing from the digital garden approach to personal publishing advocated by Maggie Appleton and others. Maggie even uses the term “plant” to mean posting an item (and “tend” to edit). That’s probably where the similarities end, because Maggie defines a digital garden as a collection of notes — “evolving ideas that aren’t strictly organised by their publication date.” When I use the term “replant,” I basically mean to republish an article using the original publication date.

For example, here’s the replanting of my first ever blog post from my old tech blog, ReadWriteWeb (2003-2012):

My first ReadWriteWeb blog post replanted A classic ReadWriteWeb blog post replanted. The original post had disappeared from the web.

You’ll notice that I use the original publish date, 20 April 2003. That's because I haven’t changed the content, or anything else significant. I only added this note, in italics, at the end of the post:

“Originally published on my tech blog ReadWriteWeb, which ran from 2003-2012. Replanted on Cybercultural in September 2025.”

Another feature in my replanting is to use a screenshot from the Wayback Machine as the lead image for the article (or placed elsewhere if there's a better lead image). I think it's important to show what the post looked like in its original context.

I want to emphasise here that I am replanting a) articles that I originally wrote and published; and b) only in cases where the original article has either disappeared from the web or is currently in a neglected state on the original site. This is about saving heritage web pages. It's also about reclaiming something that is important to me, but clearly is not important to the current operator of my old site.

2009 RWW interview with Tim Berners-Lee My in-person 2009 interview with Tim Berners-Lee, replanted on Cybercultural; this was originally a two-part series, but one of the posts (part one!) was deleted from the origin site and part two is now a mess design-wise and surrounded by inappropriate content.

Cool URIs Don't Change (Unless They Do)

As someone said on Mastodon when I posted about replanting, this does unfortunately break Tim Berners-Lee’s rule that “Cool URIs don't change.” I think he originally wrote that in 1998, when it was almost impossible to foresee the scale of broken links and parasite SEO we are living through on today’s web. I write an internet history article every week here on Cybercultural, and it seems like every second historical link I click is either a 404, a redirect, a dog’s breakfast design-wise, or no longer contains the original content.

So, maybe that 1998 rule needs to be updated: Cool URIs don’t change, but sometimes they're junked or left to rot — in which case, you need a cool new URI. Hmmm, not quite as catchy. But giving an abandoned article a home at a new web address is a pragmatic solution to saving the old web, one page at a time.

Finally, another benefit of replanting is that — with a bit of luck — your rescued webpage will be reseeded in Google’s search index. So if people search for the topic of your post, or a phrase you used (like “the read/write web”), they will now be able to find your content.

First post reseeded in Google My 2003 post reseeded in Google in 2025.

You can find a selection of replanted posts in the RWW Archive section of Cybercultural. It'll grow over time, as I reclaim my posts from oblivion. I hope you consider doing the same for the articles you so lovingly created back in the day.

Lead image by Natalia Blauth via Unsplash+.