unflashed

So one of the less fun things about having a blog -- or really any sort of website -- for almost 15 years is having to deal with bit rot periodically, which I just did again over the weekend. You might have seen that Adobe Flash will be officially dead, really most sincerely dead, on December 31st, unsupported by both Adobe and all major browsers. I absolutly approve of this given that Flash was a truly endless source of CVEs over the years; the problem was that there was stil a bunch of old Flash here for me to deal with. Back in the early years of this humble blog, if you needed to embed anything beyond a simple <img>, Flash was almost unavoidable. HTML5 didn't exist, Javascript wasn't up to the job yet, and building it with a Java applet or ActiveX control would have been even worse.

I've always tended to take more photos than will fit comfortably in a blog post, so it was a huge step forward when Flickr added an embeddable slideshow widget; I could just paste that in at the top of a post, embed a map below it, and voila, a long-running formula was born. And of course this new widget was Flash-based. They later replaced that widget with an iframe-based one in 2014, after Flash became nonessential and unpopular, and a couple of years after that they switched to a JS solution for better mobile support. Over time, Chrome and other browsers started turning Flash off by default, in anticipation of killing it off entirely someday, but I never quite got around to going back and un-Flash-ifying all my old Flickr slideshows. I had updated a few when I bumped into them, but were still about 200 of them left on posts in the 2006-2014 timeframe, and it just seemed like a huge hassle and I never got around to it. But like I said, Flash goes away entirely at the end of the year, and I gave myself a TODO item a few months ago to go rescue my poor decaying vintage content before then. I finally made some time over a much-needed staycation that wrapped up last weekend, so I think this long-running corner of the interwebs is now 100% Flash-free.

I figured I needed a way to at least semi-automate this update process so it wouldn't be quite as tedious, and I remembered a little tool I put together some years ago to help generate an embeddable Google map with placemarks for geotagged blog posts. The Map page for this humble log explains in more detail how that process works, which is still sadly not automatic after all these years. Speaking of which, I should probably update that map again while I'm thinking of it. Anyway, since I already had a tool that spoke Blogger's GeoRSS dialect, I figured I'd just adapt it to my new problem. The fastest & most automated way would have been to emit an updated GeoRSS file that I could just re-import over top of the existing blog. I couldn't quite persuade myself to trust that, though, so instead I just had it create a CSV file listing the posts with offending slideshows, along with some generated html for a non-flash replacement slideshow. So at least I only had to open each offending post, paste the new html onto the old slideshow, save, wash, rinse, repeat.

While I was doing that over the course of a few hours, it occurred to me that a lot of those old posts were kind of fun to go back and read, so I added an "unflashed" tag to all those posts I updated, as an easy way to go back and look at a bunch of them at a time. I dunno, I kind of like reminders from thatt distant pre-pandemic era when you could just go outside whenever you wanted, unmasked, and the president was not a malignant orange lunatic who still might kill us all sometime between now and Inauguration Day next year. I also figured this update was worth a blog post, partly due to the trouble I'd gone to, but mostly just to pat myself on the back for finally fixing something I'd been procrastinating over for years. Anyway, have fun & enjoy the old posts if you're interested, or morbidly curious, or whatever.