Cogitating a quandary
I have been doing a bit of thinking lately.
That of course is nothing unusual. Unless I am asleep I am usually thinking about something or other. My thinking box is still in reasonable functioning order.
The latest little problem which has been receiving my divided attention is the problem of websites.
I have a few sites in my little stable. I pay for them but that isn’t the problem. The problem is what happens to them when I stop paying for them? It has crossed my mind [more thinking?] that I am not eternal and the day [or night] may come when I bugger off to the Great Unknown. I will be honest here – when I do bugger off, the least of my concerns will be the paying of bills. Presumably then all my sites will vanish with me.
There are a couple of sites that I would consider to be of interest to the world at large: Anna Raccoon and Martin Scriblerus to name but two. Neither of them will set the Interweb alight but on the other hand they do receive constant and regular traffic. If they suddenly vanished I think quite a few people would notice.
As part of this little ponderation I have been doing a little tidy up of my stable. “Going like Sixty” is no more as it has sort of morphed into “Going like Sixty – Close to Dead” [Don’t ask – long story]. I have also killed another couple of sites as they were getting zero traffic and the owners didn’t respond to my mails. I think I might dump “Smoking – on Ethics” as it gets very little traffic. I’m in two minds about “A Pipe and a Keyboard” as I very rarely update it but I find it handy if I come across a problem that I have solved in the past.
Bugger!
Problems………
There must be a tidy-up vibe left behind by last week’s storm. I have spent this (cold wet) afternoon tidying up my office/hobby room. After hours of scrabbling around making piles of stuff to sort and making difficult decisions I have thrown away old instruction leaflets, discs and pamphlets, enough to make shelf space for one whole additional book from the loose stack. The room doesn’t look any different to 3 hours ago.This Swedish death cleaning is definitely not for the faint hearted.
Hah! I hadn’t heard of that before. I have done those massive cleanups before and inevitably ended up putting everything back. The only solution is to hire a skip…
I hope you can save Kevin’s site, but please don’t lose Anna I loved her site, she called me on video not long before she died. I was really surprised, we had exchanged emails but she had never called before. Kevin was a joy, I loved the stories of his travels. He sent me some really interesting stuff about Iran as he knew I had lived there until the revolution. Miss captain Ranty too but his final emails made me so sad, he as very distressed. Keep up the good work.
Sadly I only started to get in touch with Anna just before the end. To this day I regret not asking her for a backup of her site. It would have been so easy and would have saved a massive amount of work trying to reconstruct it from various other sources. Kevin’s site was no problem as I hosted it so had all the backups.
It would be good to have the raccoon arms continue quietly gathering dust in a corner of t’interwebs (and this site too).
Not one of yours, but I just checked thewhitedsepulchre.blogspot.com and it is still there nearly 8 years on and “The Last Blog Post – “Don’t Be Safe” as relevant as ever.
I don’t know about this site!!
I have a couple of ideas about archiving sites. One is to move them to WordPress [the free one]. The problem there, I discovered, is that Anna’s site is too big to be imported, and that probably goes for this one too. The other idea is to “flatten” the sites. Currently they use WordPress and all its associated files and also large databases. As the Anna and Nisakiman sites require no changes, my idea was to convert them to pure HTML. They should be smaller then and would have no databases to complicate them. So far I am having very limited success.