What happens to our blogs when we die? 21 ▲ Michael Harley 45 days ago · 5 min read1094 words · Tech · hide · 2 comments If Emily Dickinson had written her poems on her Wordpress blog, her host would have deleted them outright when the bill came due. Instead, her sister found 1,800 poems written on paper and stored in a drawer. Words written on paper take an intentional decision to destroy them whereas words written online usually require an intentional decision to keep them. In this modern blogging age how do we make our writing last? I do not have any important writing on this blog but I do want my family to have access to it after I've shuffled off this mortal coil. Here is what I'm doing to make my site and writing less ephemeral. When I first started down this path, I thought I'd be able to build my site and configure my hosting such that the site would last for at least 10 years after my passing. As I've tried to figure this out, I think I've determined that there are just too many variables to ensure this will work as planned. My site URL gets a decaying number of years and I must pick which… Log in to reply on the Fediverse. Comments will appear here. John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social 42 days ago [-] @michaelharley I have thought a bit about this.When my friend Matthew Green died 1½ years ago, his site was set up to persist, for a while at least. Then Typepad shut down soon after, throwing all of his writing into the electronic void.Suffice to say, depending on free corporate hosting to preserve your work is absolutely not a guarantor of preservation.The Wayback Machine also helps, but their snapshots tend to be random and scattershot, often incomplete, and also lacking images, media and downloadables. This is not intended as a slight against the Internet Archive, but it is a fact that I have had to content with on multiple occasions.The true answer is: if you're not rich and set up a long-term payment plan, there is no way to ensure your work survives online. Indeed, what's to stop the service from shutting down your account anyway and pocketing the cash, unless you have relatives or an estate to fight for it? John Harris @rodneylives@mefi.social 42 days ago [-] @michaelharley All of this is just to repeat, despite that terrible saying you may have heard: THE INTERNET IS NOT FOREVER.
