I started Montreal City Weblog in November 2001. Until 2010 this blog was done via Blogger without commenting; it was hosted on montreal.com until October 2017.
Blogger used to offer a service where it stored posts in its own database, transferring them to the user’s server incrementally via FTP. I used this service. In March 2006 montreal.com had a disk crash. I had hoped the FTP service could rebuild my local site from scratch, but the nearly 6000 posts that had accumulated since 2001 were too much for it. So I restarted the blog, looking just like the old blog but without a reader archive, and continued posting.
In 2009 Blogger announced the FTP option was to be discontinued. I decided to change over to WordPress and attempted to convert at least the 2006-2009 archive to WordPress format. A few posts made it, but again I think I was overwhelming the scripts with the mass quantity of postings.
In March 2010 I launched the WordPress version of the blog, with commenting on.
For the record, the first Blogger era from 2001 to 2006 had 5,974 posts in it, and the second from 2006 to 2009 had 7,594 posts. Since this blog has mostly short posts and I tend to post four to eight times a day, it adds up.
October 2017: Thanksgiving weekend the blog’s longtime server died. The archives of many years of posts and comments are probably fine on the server’s drive, but for the moment it’s not accessible. I will let readers know of any change in this situation.
The loss of the older archives is a pity, but it’s not as bad as it might be. Most news media allow links to lapse or change. This means that most of my old posts are no longer linked to live stories or pages anyway.
If for any reason you’d like me to look something up for you in that archive, drop me a line.