On planting seeds

Matt asked me a question recently about the end of my People and Blogs run. The question was if I always thought I was going to hand it over at some point, and it’s an interesting question worth expanding on, which is why I told him I was going to write a post about it, rather than simply answering via email. I started and ended more online projects than I can remember at this point. I bought a dozen domain names, coded way too many sites, only to have them all inevitably bite the dust, sometimes months later, sometimes years later. But I don’t think I ever started a project with a set deadline in mind. All the projects were open-ended, always. Back in September 2021, I posted about the shutting down of my thegallery.io, a site I ran for almost 7 years, and in that post, I wrote Once the passion is gone, it is gone. There's no point in dragging things until you reach some random date in the future. When I started People and Blogs, the plan was to run it for a single year: 52…