Articles that stand the test of time

This week for Throwback Thursday we’ll take a break from making fun of the bad decisions of the past and actually point out something that we got right.

The year was 2011 and the country was deep in recession. Everyone still wore those really skinny glasses and thought the iPhone 4 was cool. The word was a different place.

In May, 2011 we published an article about installing a preamp. You can read it here on our blog or see it in its original form at the Internet Archive.  Either way, it’s a surprisingly good article. (I didn’t write it, by the way.)

You can see that there is a simple way to install a preamp and you get a very simple diagram. Sure, it doesn’t go into much more detail than that, but if you need to learn more you can read a lot of things I’ve written since. When it all comes down to it though, this one article started it all and it still gives you a decent understanding of what to do.

It’s just another example of how, if you do good work, it’s going to last for a long time and be helpful to a lot of people. On the other hand, if you do sloppy work it’s probably also going to last for a long time and you’ll always be saddened that you didn’t spend just a little more time

Looking back at this blog…

I’ve written over 20,000 articles for this blog since I took over in January, 2012. I migrated the blog to its new home in February 2018. At that time I was able to find 4,000 articles that still stood up. Many of the rest are still easy to find at The Internet Archive, still others are in an offline backup that may or may not ever see the light of day. The 40% of articles that were transferred over represents some good work, but I do come back now and again to think about how I might have even had 10,000 good articles or more if I’d just spent a bit more time on things. Oh well, I can always try harder in the coming year.

About the Author

Stuart Sweet
Stuart Sweet is the editor-in-chief of The Solid Signal Blog and a "master plumber" at Signal Group, LLC. He is the author of over 10,000 articles and longform tutorials including many posted here. Reach him by clicking on "Contact the Editor" at the bottom of this page.