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What Ever Happened to ChipDesignMag.com

My blogging career started out after an EDA lunch in Oregon circa 2008 where John Blyler invited me to setup my own blog at chipdesignmag.com, and I agreed to blog for free, not knowing that 13 years later that I would still be blogging away about all things semiconductor, IP and EDA. From 2008 to January 2011 I was minding my own business and writing about what I love, then I met Daniel Nenni who asked me to blog at SemiWiki.com and get paid, so I made the jump and never looked back.

Where Is It

Out of curiosity last week I wanted to see how chipdesignmag.com was doing, and was shocked to see that the site had been removed. Not a problem, I just went to my favorite time machine, aka https://archive.org and there it was, a snapshot of the site over many years, however after July 6, 2019 it appeared to get turned off.

Scraping

The problem was that I really wanted to have a record of my first three years of blogging, 2008-2010, and then an idea started to hatch. What if I could use archive.org and write a PHP program to scrape all of my old blogs from the archived site, then import them into my WordPress site here?

Build or Buy

I did a quick Google search to see if there were any commercial tools out there to do the same task, and there were, however they wanted to scrape the entire site, and I only wanted the blogs that I authored, not the sidebars and all of the ads, etc. On Friday I created a WordPress plugin to do just that, tested it out, then used it to scrape three years of blogs from archive.org over to this site. Not all of the old photos were saved at archive.org, so we have some broken IMG tags buried in the HTML. I even managed to scrape all of the comments.

Blogs Migrated

See the old blogs here, or just use the Search feature in the header of any page.

Social Sharing

When I first started scraping the old content into new blogs, an automated feature on my WordPress site started to Tweet and update LinkedIn, so I quickly turned that feature off, and went back into Twitter and LinkedIn, deleting the content, so I apologize if you saw 13 year old tweets and posts, and were wondering if I stepped into a time machine.

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