Aug
17
Breaking the Web?
When we launched the Hurricane Blog project we thought that it would be temporary. Almost a year later we took the blog down and one of our former employees complained that we were “breaking the web.” We are now faced with a similar problem.
The Real World: Key West sponsor, Mystic Tan, asked us to build and manage a blog to run in conjunction with the show. The show ended in July and the client sees no need to continue the project. The blog is called “Inside the booth” and is authored by Ricky Croft from Mystic Tan.
What do we do? Are we obligated to keep it up and running forever even though Mystic Tan is not going to pay us for continued management and hosting? There are hundreds of links into the site, by taking it down we effectively break the web according to Adaptive Path, Mike Arrington and David Parmet (guys I really respect). On an ironic sidenote, the Adaptive Path post titled “The Web is Fragile don’t Break it!” now shows a 404 error. I am not sure why they took it down, but I suspect it has to do with the veracity of the information they received.
Any ideas? What obligation does the world have to continue to maintain electronic ideas in the form of websites when the ideas have run their course? Some people say that bandwidth and space are cheap so you should just keep everything up and running. But what about people to keep things running? What about WordPress upgrades? Do we upgrade the sites that are historical? What about security patches? If we are running various historical sites at various version levels and there are security issues we will have to resolve them on a blog by blog basis. In some cases we will have to upgrade them to current software revisions. At the end of the day, the cost isn’t just bandwidth and space – there is a management overhead that will grow with each piece of “history” we become responsible for.
If you really feel that the content and incoming links have long-term value to the world in general, then I would suggest converting the site to static HTML. Most of your security and management concerns go away, and the site is still there.
Comment by Roger Benningfield — August 18, 2006 @ 7:49 am
If you really feel that the content and incoming links have long-term value to the world in general, then I would suggest converting the site to static HTML. Most of your security and management concerns go away, and the site is still there.
Comment by Roger Benningfield — August 18, 2006 @ 7:49 am
[...] I’ve had a few conversations with a few different people about what is going to happen in the future to our pictures, powerpoints, movies, etc as we move into the Digital Age. Traditionally having things in hard copy make it easy to preserve, just put it on the shelf. But what happens in 20 years when the mp3 format is ancient history? Will it be a requirement for new technologies that they be able to play all previous formats? Wouldn’t that be a limiting factor? Are we going to have to constantly migrate our files into the newest formats if we want to preserve things? I have hundreds of pictures from the past 4 or 5 years but about 20 of those are in hardcopy. What happens when image file formats change? Will those pictures get lost in the mix? Whenever I bring these things up people usually think its a good point but there seems to be very little discussion about it. One of my favorite blogs that I have in my feed reader is the Texas Statup Blog by Weblogs Work that profiles Texas Startups. An associated blog recently blogged about Breaking the Web? To summarize he talks about what is expected of a website? If a website serves its purpose is there a responsibility to keep paying for it to be hosted to prevent “breaking the web” as he puts it given the assumption that other websites have linked. This is a similar problem to the formatting issue in that digital files need a lot of maintanence to keep everything running smoothly. I recently ran across the Internet Archive at archive.org. They have a Wayback Machine that crawls the internet and archives webpages. The project first started crawling webpages in 1996 long before many companies even had solid websites. At first I thought it was kind of cool. Images don’t always archive smoothly but you can view ESPN.com’s original site or the original Google.com. You can see Johnson Printing Service’s original website built in 1999 and the September 21, 2003 archive of the JPS website I built during the summer of 2003. The internet has definetely come a long way. The year 1996 wasn’t that long ago but those archived sites look so oldschool. [...]
Pingback by Internet Archive - Hujo Blogger — August 19, 2006 @ 1:12 pm
[...] I’ve had a few conversations with a few different people about what is going to happen in the future to our pictures, powerpoints, movies, etc as we move into the Digital Age. Traditionally having things in hard copy make it easy to preserve, just put it on the shelf. But what happens in 20 years when the mp3 format is ancient history? Will it be a requirement for new technologies that they be able to play all previous formats? Wouldn’t that be a limiting factor? Are we going to have to constantly migrate our files into the newest formats if we want to preserve things? I have hundreds of pictures from the past 4 or 5 years but about 20 of those are in hardcopy. What happens when image file formats change? Will those pictures get lost in the mix? Whenever I bring these things up people usually think its a good point but there seems to be very little discussion about it. One of my favorite blogs that I have in my feed reader is the Texas Statup Blog by Weblogs Work that profiles Texas Startups. An associated blog recently blogged about Breaking the Web? To summarize he talks about what is expected of a website? If a website serves its purpose is there a responsibility to keep paying for it to be hosted to prevent “breaking the web” as he puts it given the assumption that other websites have linked. This is a similar problem to the formatting issue in that digital files need a lot of maintanence to keep everything running smoothly. I recently ran across the Internet Archive at archive.org. They have a Wayback Machine that crawls the internet and archives webpages. The project first started crawling webpages in 1996 long before many companies even had solid websites. At first I thought it was kind of cool. Images don’t always archive smoothly but you can view ESPN.com’s original site or the original Google.com. You can see Johnson Printing Service’s original website built in 1999 and the September 21, 2003 archive of the JPS website I built during the summer of 2003. The internet has definetely come a long way. The year 1996 wasn’t that long ago but those archived sites look so oldschool. [...]
Pingback by Internet Archive - Hujo Blogger — August 19, 2006 @ 1:12 pm