A Mountain of Text Files
Hidden away in Dropbox I have a neatly organised collection of every written post I have published on the internet since the beginning of 2003. Each individual post has it's own text file, formatted in markdown format, beginning with the title, then the date, then the body text. Yes, I know I'm a lunatic.
You don't want to know how difficult it was to create all those text files, and not have the programming trip over stupid things like the extended character set (all the curly quotes, elipses, em dashes, and so on). I spent several hours one night headbutting the desk repeatedly. You might question how headbutting a desk helps fix bugs in programming, but it does.
I should probably mention that I killed the blog attached to my name earlier this afternoon. I saw a notice to upgrade the webserver, and ended up completely lunching it. I actually tried twice – and lunched it twice. Given that I'm not a Linux administrator, and I should really have been doing something else at the time, I thought “f*ck it”, and destroyed it. Apologies to the guys working on the Ghost blog platform, but you really need to work on the upgrade procedure.
I suppose I could import the text files into Scrivener, and produce perhaps the most boring, long winded book about nothing in the English Language. The tagline could read “everything you never wanted to know about somebody that really doesn't matter” – or something like that.