I worry as I type these words: Years from now, will this very post still sit atop this blog? That’s the danger in having your friend Randy build you a fancy website. More particularly, that’s the danger in building a website that pretends it will be updated. I’ve seen too many blogs frozen in time, forever pointing at their creators as someone who once had a bright idea for a blog.
This is a problem unique to the digital age. A copy of a newspaper is complete unto itself. You would never know, picking it up, whether it was aborted mere weeks later because its authors just didn’t have the time. An abandoned website, however, shows the sum efforts of its creator to every reader. It’s obvious exactly when things ground to a halt. Even worse, it can always be revived. It is waiting in cruel stasis.
I’m reminded of the “Under Construction” signs that mark the graveyards of Geocities, MySpace AngelFire, which someone helpfully archived. These were an early acknowledgement that nothing on the internet is ever done. Maybe they were apologies for the fact that we no longer had paper costs and space limits to excuse the limits of our scope. And, like this blog post, they were a possibly empty promise that the author would return.
I almost had Randy exclude this section of the website altogether. But, hell, maybe the shame of this lonely post will bring me back here to write.