Not everything I’ve ever published online needs to last

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…