We lead our lives, and when they end, sometimes we leave a little of ourselves behind. Sometimes we leave money, a painting, sometimes we leave a kind word.
And sometimes, we leave an empty space.
George in “Dead Like Me”
I have seen a couple of great blogs vanish. Suddenly, the website does not exist anymore. The information you were sure was available — just isn’t anymore. Sure, there is parallel creativity, there is plagiarism, there are different solutions to problems, so it’s not the end of the world. But it’s taxing.
It’s one of the reasons why I use DEVONthinks “export page to PDF and send to DEVONthink” Browser plugin and religiously save every page as PDF that might be useful. Oftentimes, before I read it (completely). With DEVONthinks search function (page name or content) I have my private copy of the web I have seen and want to remember.
But what about my own blog?
Organizing Creativity started as just-for-fun project, and it still is. It’s advertisement free (granted, I wouldn’t notice it too, given that I use an adblocker), meaning it’s on a paid server. It’s a “labor of love”, but not something my family would continue.
Sure, I’m middle-aged, healthy (I think), and relatively optimistic about the future, but accidents can happen. I never understood why some people think themselves as immortal or never plan for that one moment where you are in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing.
So I’ve set up a posting that should appear if there are no changes to this site for a month or two, to at least warn readers that the blog might vanish soon. A kind of insurance. And even writing in that posting that I expect false alarms (fuck-ups do happen), it promptly lead to a false alarm.
Reason being: I haven’t found a way to set up something like: “If I don’t log in for x months, post this posting”, so I used a scheduled posting. Which required me to change the day it gets published occasionally. And I promptly forgot to do so.
And it — understandably (and thankfully but unintended 🙂 ) — lead to some questions by people who know me or read my blog … but yeah, it might be a strange perspective, but it’s a character … strength or flaw of mine, I think about different possible developments, even those I definitely don’t like.
But still, it is basically a good idea to plan for the worst. The work I am most proud of here, the second edition of Organizing Creativity, will endure, no question about it. It’s on Amazon and Lulu. Unlikely that both will fold in the near future. But it would be a shame about the postings on this blog (I think).
But, with any luck, that’s a worst-case scenario that will not happen for … I don’t know, 50 years? Still, it’s good to have a Plan B, even if it leads to false alarms.
