I've been thinking of the best way to make a website that won't die when I die. It seems like a hard problem. I was originally going to just trust that Github Pages will be around forever, but I'm not so sure anymore.
Running your own server is fraught with danger. In theory it's just a matter of making sure your account has enough credits to last 100 years. In practice, I can't count the number of times that servers have had one problem or another that requires manual intervention to resurrect.
It's surprising that this isn't a solved problem. "Put some HTML somewhere" has always left the question of "where?"
Maybe paying for your own S3 account and shoving the HTML onto that is the way to go. Still, thinking of the number of companies that have survived even 20 years, the odds aren't good that both S3 and Cloudflare will run flawlessly for decades.
Oh yeah, the reason we're able to read these comments now is because Dan migrated HN away from Cloudflare, I think to Route 53. So maybe S3 + Route 53 has the highest odds of standing the test of time.
Then there's the question of what to write. But at least "test website please ignore" has a chance of lasting a century, unlike everyone else.
Sadly, Michael died long before his time, and I'm not going to be around for ever, but I suspect you'll be able to read his work for a very long time via the Internet Archive at
https://web.archive.org/web/20080621173441/http://killsave.org/Killsave_Manifesto.htm
It's said that most people look at a painting in a gallery for fewer than 30 seconds. I'd be willing to guess that people are going to look at an old HTML document even less than that (not to mention web scrapers which will be the most likely to uncover an old page)
There is no guarantee that the web services, companies, technologies, or even the Internet itself will stick around forever. Everything dies. The point, however, isn't to try to leave a permanent mark somewhere that says "I was here". Instead, one should nurture a sense of stewardship for newer generations to help instill them with good values that they will carry forwards in turn
So I guess the lesson is, if you want something to stick around, go for good old fashioned paper. It doesn’t need electricity, it doesn’t need servers, software, maintainers, infrastructure or any of that. And if taken care of, it might last a thousand years give or take.
Open a trust with a major bank to preserve that website and fund it with a long term annuity or investment, with instructions on how to execute it.
Not perfect of course, as trust firms and banks also fail — but I think that’s the best chance to reach 50-100 years after death.
For $200 per year, with $100 fees and $100 hosting costs, you’re looking at a $5,000 investment — assuming the “safe” 4% yearly drawdown.
Is there really no way to date a cert for a century?
B. Teach a future generation. It lives through them and gets built on.
C. Embed it in what you do. It might not be a webpage, but there's code and ideas living in organisations today that have outlived their authors.
In this sense, perhaps bash.org hasn't died. It's just outlived its domain.
Ideally not frequently interesting, though.
Says it supports full HTML theming so you could have ~arbitrary content.
Of course it’s nothing more than an organization of people promising you that they will keep the lights on for you insofar as it is feasible, but i’m not sure you can get better than that in practice
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the same, and eventually had to ask myself: why do I care? (This is just my personal reflection, not an indictment of your goals. I'm a fatalist.)
If I have to go to the trouble of setting up a 100-year trust to maintain a digital presence after my death because nobody else finds what I have to say compelling enough to archive on its own merit, is it worth preserving? Or am I just wasting my time, adding more debris to float around in [cyber]space?
Blockchain would have been useful here. Everyone could share in the storage of collective, immutable history. But all of it is lost when some trillionaire inevitably decides to start a competing, incompatible product with a flashier UI.
As long as someone cares to maintain them, they will be there. And if nobody cares to maintain them, well, may others rise in their place.
I am starting an early warning system, a daemon process, polling random web sites for status lines like this. Do I need to handle Unicode?
- Investigating - We are working to correct an issue that is causing some servers to be degraded and unavailable. - Update - We are continuing to investigate this issue.
We had a bunch of 530 codes returned on our endpoints, although Cloudflare says that they implemented a fix at 22:39 UTC, we don't have an increased rate of errors since 22:10 UTC.