It took me longer than I expected, but I think I have trimmed out all the image tags that link back to xs.to, and either replaced or gutted images from posts that previously piped ads into here. Three years of more-or-less daily posting, and at an average of around one image uploaded for every two or three posts I made, and I think you can probably guess about how many images that involves.

It might also explain why posts even as new as a few months ago were popping up as ads. The bandwidth is formidable, and it might just be that they got tired of piping things to me.

The good side of the time it took, is that I also used the opportunity to tighten up some very old posts from the earliest days of this blog. When I started using WordPress.com, there was no tag for source code, and I often used blockquote tags to set off statistics or numbers. This time I polished up things like the dusty old speed tips for Edgy, or some extremely early speed tests of Windows 2000 against Xubuntu.

It’s also interesting to see how things changed over time, but sad to see so much of it disappear. In places where I used ImageShack the pictures are still there, but unfortunately elsewhere they’re gone.

I’ll say it once more, for the last time: I learned my lesson here. I can stomach the extra steps it takes to insert a post with the bloatastic WordPress.com backend, if it means I never have to sift through posts looking for ads again. I’m sad that it took so much time to weed out the pollution, and sad that so much of my early Ubuntu days are imageless. 😦