Keeping personal writing, photographs and social-media history locally accessible instead of renting access to one’s own past.
A personal website should be more than a current profile. It can also be the durable copy of work and conversations that originally lived inside services with changing rules, broken exports and uncertain lifetimes.
My approach is deliberately offline-first: request the official export, transfer it myself, import only local files and preserve original dates and identifiers. Public pages never depend on an API, embed, OAuth token or a social network remaining available.
This hub connects the technical build notes with older attempts to rescue photographs, move publishing systems and keep abandoned corners of the web readable. It also points directly to the two living archives on elkin.de.
Explore the living archives
Browse the local social-media archive
Locally hosted social posts, photographs and videos imported from official exports.
Explore the legacy web archive
Google+, old link dumps and other remains of earlier versions of the web.
Selected articles
Building a local social-media archive
The complete design and repair story behind the offline social-media archive at /dev/socialmedia/.
finishing the job
A site-wide preservation project: fewer plugins, repaired legacy markup, stable URLs and a dedicated home for abandoned web content.
Get photos from google+ using the command line in linux
An older command-line method for retaining a local copy of photographs from Google+ and Picasa.
Moving to WordPress
The move from Pivot to WordPress, with the old site intentionally left available while crawlers and readers caught up.
Make your web directories nicer with h5ai
Turning a plain server directory into a usable local web interface for browsing retained files.
Moving to Mastodon
A small historical marker in the continuing movement between social platforms.