The prolific blogger (and initiator of JUnited), Robert Birming asks a particularly pertinent question, Where do Blogs go when they die? His experience of broken links and blogs entirely disappeared is one I can relate to, as would most people who have written on the web or been digital natives for any significant amount of time.
A particularly poignant one for me was feverishly reading Teju Cole’s Nigeria blog in 2006 before he took it offline. The Wayback Machine was (and still is) useful for dredging up bits of it
Link rot is something I have contributed to over the years with several domain name and hosting/ software changes impacting the viability of old links to my online body of work.
Since writing actively online here again, I have ridden the waves of “free” static pages and LLMs (Claude in my case) to archive my old stuff: my long term blog dating back to 2007 and a project I curated many years ago (the3six5NG). Thanks to both, the bar for properly archiving a blog as a static page is much lower than it has ever been.
So where do blog go when they die? They shouldn’t die per se, but should rest in stasis in the digital equivalent of cryo-preservation: a static site as well as crawled pages on the Wayback Machine.
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