Not everything I’ve ever published online needs to last 8 ▲ Down the Road 67 days ago · 5 min read1078 words · Writing · hide · 3 comments I’ve been thinking lately about what happens to my online writing and photographs after I die. To be clear, at my current age I expect to last at least another 20 years. But I’ve entered the time of life where my death isn’t an abstract someday — I can see it from here. I’m not kidding myself that my work is so important that it must go into the National Archives or the Library of Congress. But my children and grandchildren might enjoy a connection to me through my work. And I have done some original research into, and exploration of, historic roads that someone is likely to find valuable after I’m gone. They say that what you put on the Internet is forever. It’s not true. Plenty of stuff I wrote on the Internet in the 90s is gone because the platforms where I published it are gone or have decayed. The same will eventually happen to my more recent work. My blogs are on WordPress.com, most of my photographs live on Flickr, and it’s all tied together under my jimgrey.net domain. At some… Log in to reply on the Fediverse. Comments will appear here. unattributed 𓂃✍︎ @unattributed@gotosocial.social 67 days ago [-] Funny that you should start thinking about this. A gentleman named Michael Harley made a similar post about this, and I had some thoughts on it:Michael's post: https://michaelharley.net/posts/2026/08/06/what-happens-to-our-blogs-when-we-die/My post: https://unattributed.cc/2026/08/09/website-archival-and-preservation/We were thinking more technically about how to archive / preserve our websites. this might be worth looking at for you. Jim Grey @jimgrey@mastodon.social 67 days ago [-] @unattributed I've come to realize that I'm not the next Emily Dickinson and that it's okay if my site fades away after I die. I'm choosing to be satisfied in the pleasure it brought me, and the online friends it made me, while I am alive. I'll make books for my children out of the posts that will remind them who their father was. unattributed 𓂃✍︎ @unattributed@gotosocial.social 67 days ago [-] @jimgrey Sure, I was just thinking that you might want to mine our content a bit for methods that might make it easier to archive and later edit your posts into books.
