Internet

Whenever I write about linkrot on the web, like I did yesterday, and like I’ve been doing for years, I occasionally get a bit of pushback. Firstly, there’s “But surely people have the right to delete their old stuff from the web?” To which my answer is simple: yes, of course they do. It’s their stuff, after all. I’m just pointing out that it might not always be such a great idea.

The second bit of pushback is trickier. “I generally agree with what you say, but do you really expect people to pay for domain names for years to keep dead projects online?”

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to refute that one. It’s a real problem. Indeed, it’s a problem I face every year, where I have to pay to keep Observation Dome (last updated July 2006) and Noise to Signal (last updated December 2009) online. Moreover, there are a fair few domains I have actually let lapse, for exactly this reason. For the first few months of Dirty Feed’s life, the site was called “Transitorized”, with the domain transistorized.org.¹ I didn’t keep that registered. I simply couldn’t justify the expense, when the site never really gained any traction under that name.

Yeah, the word you’re searching for is “hypocrite”. Hey, I let my old blog fall offline as well, for that matter. I learnt from my mistakes.

So if you’ve been active online for years, and you’re the kind of person who gathers endless defunct projects with their own domains, then it can get very expensive, very quickly. I might only have two of those now, but others have more. Sometimes many, many more. This is a problem with no easy solution, and I wouldn’t like to pretend otherwise.

I will tell you what I eventually realised, though: that buying domain names at the drop of a hat often isn’t your best option, for the exact reason described above. I used to buy them all the time, often for vague projects which never really happened anyway. These days, the newest domain name I own is… erm, dirtyfeed.org, bought in 2010.² In general, it’s often best to build yourself a place online under one name, and have it be the home of all your little projects on the web.

This can be good for pure, evil, branding purposes. You don’t have to build up a name from scratch each time. But it’s also good because it completely solves the problem above. You don’t end up owning endless domain names, costing you money long after you’ve finished a project. You simply have one, which is in constant use for whatever you’re up to.

Dirty Feed right now is usually “John writes about old telly”. But that’s not what the site actually is. Dirty Feed is really “Whatever fun thing John finds interesting”. In 20 years time, I’m still expecting Dirty Feed to be online and doing something. But what it’s doing might be something entirely different. For all I know, it’ll be knitting patterns. Regardless: one site, one name, endless projects.

Not that the above helps anyone who had a youthful penchant for buying loads of domains. The best solution if you can’t justify the expense is just to let those domain names lapse, and mirror all your old content on your current, rather-more-permanent site. Sure, all your links will break, and it wouldn’t solve the errant porn link issue I mentioned in my last piece, but it’s better than nothing.

It’s worth emphasising once more: all I really intend to do with these pieces is to inspire people to think about the issue. It’s not really about following a rigid rule of never letting your old stuff fall offline. It’s meant to be more subtle. “Are you really sure you want that to happen?” is closer to the mark.

A brilliant piece of analysis turning to dust; two decades of you changing as a person which someone found inspiring, gone; and yes, your magazine about indie video games becoming a porn site. If that’s what you actually want, then it’s your choice.

I just think there’s something to be said for a little preservation, that’s all. You never know what someone is going to find useful.

1. What a dreadful name, incidentally. I really, really struggled with what to call this place, and it was the best one I came up with before launch, based on an old Kenny Everett line about “transistorised people”. Long, dull, confusing. The delightful double meaning of Dirty Feed is a hundred times better. ↩

2. Well, technically, it’s observationdome.org, but that was repurchasing an old domain name I used to own, and then let lapse, so it doesn’t count. See here for the full story. ↩

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i.
Sometimes, I randomly decide to revisit old internet dramas. Usually ones I had absolutely nothing to do with. Hey, we all need a bit of drama in our lives. I just find reading ones with nearly two decades of distance to be safer for the soul than engaging in current unpleasantness.

So it was that I decided to read up on the fuss regarding Macheist, back in 2006. The details aren’t important; you can read them yourselves if you want to. Suffice to say, it was an extremely controversial Mac software promotion. And so I went, pinging between sites, reading up on all the “latest” goss. Until I came to this, from John Gruber on Daring Fireball. A link to a piece by Buzz Andersen, described by Gruber thusly: “This is the smartest thing I’ve ever read regarding MacHeist. I wish I’d written this.”

Brilliant. So, I click on the link… and hooray, it’s broken. Luckily, I know about the Wayback Machine, so I quickly plug the link in, and what do you know, it really is the most insightful thing I’ve read about the whole Macheist affair.

The more insightful thing, yanked from the net. While other, less good takes, still survive. That doesn’t seem right, somehow.

*   *   *

ii.
When I post on here, I’ll occasionally write about someone without actually linking to their site. This is a very deliberate act. It’s usually when I want to talk about something they’ve done which I don’t like, without shining a great big spotlight on them as an individual in a way which feels unfair. With this particular example, however, I’m being ambiguous for an even better reason: this subject was only talked about in an email newsletter, and the archives of that were never publicly available. I think quoting from a private newsletter would be a dick move. So you’ll have to put up with my vague description instead.

This guy, you see, is a coder, turned novelist. They had blog archives stretching back years, decades. And over those years, they grew up, changed, and gradually became slightly embarrassed by those archives. They didn’t represent who he was today, and what he was today was a very different than who he used to be. Far better to scrub the site of those old posts, and make everything relevant to his life now.

I always thought he was wrong.

Because those archives told a story. And it was a story I found inspiring. Any given individual post might potentially be a waste of time or irrelevant, years down the line. But taken in aggregate, it told of his development from coder, to writer. A journey – yes, I did actually use that word – which I find personally relevant.

The joy of your website archives is that they aren’t front-centre of your site. As a reader, you have to specifically go and find them.¹ You can still have your career as a novelist, your website can still mainly reflect you, now… but if people want to peek at what you used to be, they can. You can even put a great fat disclaimer on the pages containing your old material if it makes you feel better; I tend to think the date alone does that for you, but it doesn’t matter.

But to deliberately delete how you changed feels to me like missing the point. The change itself is surely just as interesting as the end result.

*   *   *

iii.
1st April 2014: A brand new publication Indieverse launches, featuring an interview with Luis Zuno.
17th April 2014: Game designer Shaun Inman gives an interview to Indieverse, and links to it on his blog.
18th June 2014: The final interview on Indieverse is published, with The Olivián Brothers.
February 2015: The indieverse.co domain has expired. It comes back to life by August 2015, and then by August 2020, it’s gone for good.²
2nd April 2022: Someone points out that the Indieverse interview link on Shaun Inman’s site now unintentionally links to porn.

Brilliant.

1. It’s difficult to accidentally find yourself browsing articles from 2010 on Dirty Feed, for instance. ↩

2. Possibly gone a lot longer than that; the Wayback Machine has no record of the site from March 2016 – August 2020. ↩

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