For the record, this is no record. When I’m gone the fate of this web empire will likely follow the same path as my predecessors who left websites behind with no ongoing means of payment. This will disappear. Squatters will summarily erase everything that ever happened here. If I set up a trust and find a way to fund it I guess this nonsense could survive for a little while, but why? The timely material is no longer timely, I don’t even know how many people read this because stats are bloated with fake pageviews and AI scrapers. When my friend Joe died it was months after the fact that anyone discovered his photo gallery websites had been shut down for lack of payment. Same sort of thing happened to my friend Dennis, who had a hilarious website claiming he had built a LinkNYC killer Internet kiosk that was already deployed at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. It was not and I don’t know if the content on that site was even serious. It did get written up in an industry publication by an author who seemed to take Dennis seriously.
Joe’s digital legacy survives in the form of IG and YT content but his main portfolio site, which I thought was really quite elegant and unusual, is gone. The only folks making money off his work are YouTube and Instagram. I have nominal amounts of content on those and other platforms that will probably survive but this stuff not so much. Archive.org might pick it up but you can’t expect them to gobble up everything. What they do grab is often missing style sheets and formatting not to mention images.