The Untold Journey Behind Roge Blasco’s Revival of 6,500 Lost Travel Stories
Roge Blasco spent decades interviewing travelers and adventurers.
When the blog documenting those conversations went offline, readers lost access to years of his work.
With help from the WordPress.com team, the Basque journalist brought his archive back online — and kept adding to it.
Decades behind the microphone
A Basque journalist born in Bilbao in 1955, Roge spent 39 years hosting Levando Anclas on Radio Euskadi — every Sunday and holiday, without a single break, from 1984 to 2023. He also ran La Casa de la Palabra, a daily program covering social issues, ecology, and geography. Between the two shows, he’d do three or four interviews a day.
Mountaineers, solo sailors, cross-continental cyclists, the Dalai Lama, Edmund Hillary, Jane Goodall — they all came through Roge’s microphone.
Starting in 2006, he wrote up every conversation on a blog hosted by EiTB, the Basque public broadcaster. Over 18 years, he published more than 6,500 entries — an archive of travelers and adventurers. As Roge puts it, “A large portion of these stories don’t appear anywhere else.”
Then, in 2023, EiTB decided to close its entire blog network.
Overnight, Roge’s archive went dark.
How WordPress.com brought his archive back online
Here’s the thing that made recovery possible: Roge’s original blog ran on WordPress.
WordPress is open source software used by more than 40% of websites. It includes ways to export content and move it to another WordPress site rather than keeping years of posts tied to one host. That flexibility matters when an archive like Roge’s needs a new home.
Technically, things have advanced a lot since those early blogs. The ones WordPress designs now are more beautiful, agile, and versatile. A pleasant way to read that also works as an archive, so the memory endures.
Roge Blasco Granados, journalist and radio host
With help from the WordPress.com team, his full archive — all 6,500 entries — was restored, now with photos, audio, and an updated design. He relaunched it under a new name: La aventura continúa (“The adventure continues”).
That same idea drives the Data Liberation project: making it easier for people to move their content between platforms, instead of having to rebuild years of work in a new home.
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