Permanence
There’s something about digital media that really bothers me– ephemerality.
I’m not sure why this bothers me so much, but it really does. It bothers me even more that it doesn’t bother you.
Tonight, while heading to meet Courtney for dinner, Eran and I were talking, and I mentioned that I’d really like to update the style of this blog– as I’ve mentioned here before–but have a demand that seems to be unfulfilled. When I update the style of my blog, I want the existing, archived content to retain its current appearance, not take on the new style.
Now, it seems that very few people care about this. In fact the only other person I’ve found that cares about this wrote his own blogging tool in HyperCard. I think some of you might know him.
Anyway, Eran thinks I’m crazy for caring. I think all y’all are crazy for not caring.
I think you care too much about having a ‘dynamic’ website. But will your website stand the test of time? Will it endure?
Writing and thinking about this takes me back to a conversation I had several months ago. The topic was “what will happen to my website when I die?” Currently, no one else was access to my website, except for my host sysadmins.
Will my website just rot? I hope not.
Anyway, to step back from the ledge a bit…
Seriously, I want the archives of this site to retain their current look– they’re a snapshot in time. Are there any tools which support this?
April 25th, 2006 at 11:11 pm
Many years ago I built a journal-ish site for a friend of mine in (eep) Cold Fusion, that did just this. Basically I just associated dateranges of posts with different templates.
Cool eh? :-D
April 26th, 2006 at 1:16 am
Making a Drupal module for that would be doable.
April 26th, 2006 at 11:33 am
C’mon Ryan, you’re a hacker. This is WordPress. Just make it do it. Do it at the DevHouse.
April 26th, 2006 at 12:39 pm
Yay! ColdFusion!
April 29th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
I’ve actually thought about this a lot, Ryan. The posts made a certain time were from that time. The time when I favored that particular design. It’s always bothered me when I change the look of my blog that it changes everything that had come before.
I’m totally with you.
I wish I were a hacker.
May 1st, 2006 at 6:02 pm
plus, how nice would it be to chronicle your lack of change over time or a specific period when you changed the look with great frequency…
Design as a visual clue; a means of marking the psychology of a particular period of time.
A sort of illustrated accompaniment to your writting.
July 11th, 2006 at 6:36 am
You’re partially in luck, as folks smarter than me have observed that HTML is one of the only data format standards that we can hope to have any sort of permanence due to mass.
Storage is another matter, though. I’d love to see a standard evolve for the communication of HTML/GIF/JPG content over HTTP over 1-Wire. We could then focus on “permanent” iButtons as a sort of information-age epitaph.