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.
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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.