Longevity and permanence of our work online
Last week I had an email conversation with Véronique, after she replied to my post about commonplace books. Her perspective was about second-guessing the same things over and over, much in the way I was second-guessing where to write things down in that post. She shared some of her thoughts about where she shares her work, and I shared some of my thoughts back. We both listed our thoughts in bullet point so I thought I might flesh out the thoughts based on specific themes.
The longevity and permanence of the web
The common saying that many people subscribe to is that the Internet is permanent and written in ink. The reality is that the Internet is full of dead links. Websites that existed 30 years ago are completely gone, and sometimes websites that existed in the last 5 years are dead as well. The Wayback Machine attempts to help preserve the Internet, but it doesn't catch everything. Many things on the Internet are lost to time. In her email, Véro wrote:
When I imagine the longevity of things, when my domain runs out after I'm gone, this whole website will be unfindable. Then what? If I just plug everything into a site like are.na, my notes will always be floating around there.
It's that point that I brought up the Wayback Machine - the domain might expire, and the blog disappear, but an archive will exist (I think you might have to manually submit it, it's not automatic). She mentioned her notes always existing in are.na - but will they? When I pressed on this, she noted that not only has the website been around for 15 years (I didn't know this, as I'm only hearing about this website in the last year or so), but they have a longevity plan similar to Herman's for Bearblog. This is encouraging, but even that is no guarantee.
At this point I'm convinced that the only true way to ensure the longevity and permanence of your work is to make sure you have copies of it stored somewhere digitally and physically. I myself need to make sure I have all of my epilepsy essays online downloaded somewhere as I have them stored in different places. These are pieces I do not want to lose.
Bearblog shortcomings
We echoed each other's thoughts on Bearblog. Unfortunately, there are some glaring shortcomings that make it difficult to maintain the blog in the long term. This isn't to say that we don't like Bearblog; it's just difficult to stick with it when faced with some issues.
- No search - it's difficult to find specific posts without a search function. This is compounded when you have hundreds of posts (as some do) - the post list page is one long list. You can filter by tags, but the tag list is all the way at the bottom of this list and can be easily missed.
- some of this can be resolved with scripts (if you subscribe) - I believe someone out there implemented search on their blog. Likely you can do the same with post lists and tags1.
- Friction when it comes to posting: I'm not the only one who has raised this issue. Sometimes it can be a hassle to post quick thoughts to the blog, so many people just don't post. Personally I combat this by writing things on my phone in another app, or notepad on my desktop, and paste into the post box - easy. But other times, I find myself agreeing.
- Enter Pagecord - it's incredibly easy for people to email a post. Want to add tags? Throw them in at the bottom of the email. Formatting is done via rich text (though sometimes, I find markdown easier and more reliable). This feels like a platform accessible to more people who don't want to learn markdown. There are limitations to this service too, but I won't get into that.
Personally I don't intend to leave Bearblog (at the moment) but I have read about people that have those thoughts beyond Véro's thoughts. However having pagecord as an option for posting quicker and freer is lovely.
Some days I feel the same way as Xavier; I want to move my blog to my website and emigrate from Bearblog. But what keeps me from doing it is the fact that I would have to put more maintenance into my personal website. Currently it runs on 11ty, but has not been upgraded to 3.0. I tried setting up a new 3.0 site locally recently, and had all sorts of trouble trying to add plugins. I couldn't get them to load properly when following instructions, which leads me to believe that the instructions need to be updated. I digress - the point is that I'm happy to leave the blogging platform to people who know what they're doing.
I don't have a proper conclusion to this post, other than to say that for however many choices we have at our disposal, there will always be second-guessing the choices we've made and thinking about how the grass might be greener on the other side. Perhaps, we need to stick with it as Ava suggested.
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When I went searching for Herman's Bear manifesto, I clicked through the Bear roadmap - and it appears you can list your tags with
{{ tags }}- so you can probably make your own page with just the list of tags. I tried it on a test page draft I use to play around with different elements, and it works well.↩