The missing semester

In August of 2007, in all their infinite wisdom, the administrators of the Drupal sites at Purdue decided to move to a new server. Now, those who contacted the administrator (Jeremy Tirrel) in time could have their sites archived on the new server--a simple copy and paste job. Those who did not, well...we always knew the internet was ephemeral.
But what surprised me was that Dave Blakesley, Drupal Man himself, advocate of Drupal-ness, Mr. Lets-just-hold-class-on-the-Drupal-site, the Champion of web archiving for future generations, did NOT request our Spring 07 Viz Rhet class be archived and moved. While he kept one page, with the calendar with our readings, all of the real meat of the class--the discussions that began with intellectual bravado and ended with "*Mark does the Buffy Dance*"--are unavailable, unless I'm incredibly stupid at using websites.
So, it is gone. Just gone.
Of course, nothing on the web is ever truly gone. Well, not text anyway, so I've spent all afternoon hunting down Google's cache of my old posts--because I had some good ideas in there, somewhere, some lovely sentences that should not be forgotten.
This missing semester problem is one reason for the Internet Archive project (archive.org). Some people find the project a bit frightening--particularly those people who posted embarrassing or potentially slanderous things on a website somewhere. And I admit, the very ephemeral nature of the Web is one reason I like it--the easy mutability is somewhat comforting. You can edit yourself into a public perfection. But the Archive project seeks to catalog the Web's changes, its various mutations. Each update, each minor edit.
If you go to Archive.org, and search for www.bluffton.edu/~bccleala you can find, minus images, my old website from undergrad. Along with nearly every major edit I made. You can also find the old Witmarsums (edu/~witmarsum), Gerald's old pages, etc.
So I'm off to archive myself, so that I can prove to myself that Spring 07 really happened. Because writing, as Walter Ong, Derrida, and others remind us, is Memory, immutable mobiles for us to stack up as visual proof of our own existence. And I'll be damned if I let a server change destroy 16 weeks of my memories.