I've mothballed my blog
jgc.orgJohn, If you're reading this, please reconsider and at least keep the pages up. Just stop adding to them. There's a wealth of good stuff in there and it's painful to see a hole in the web like this. Whatever you chose, thank you very much for all your contributions, it's been a pleasure.
All the blog pages are still there. I haven't taken it down.
By mothballing I mean: I've stopped updating, I've disabled further comments and the front page has just one story on it, but it's all there and indexed. I don't intend to delete stuff from the Internet as I know there are many people who read the old stuff I wrote (thousands of page views per day).
If anything has broken I would like to know about it as that's not what I wanted. I just wanted to be free of the responsibility of coming up with new stuff. My life is so full that it was getting neglected and so I decided to prune rather than let it wither.
I'm grateful that you're leaving the stuff up. I've learned a lot from you over the years. So long, and thanks for all the fish.
I completely understand. It's just that I used your homepage to navigate from there. Ok, fair enough :) Once again, thanks a ton and if I can ever help you know where to find me, just ask. j.
I use the term "let lie fallow" for my long neglected personal webpage.
Archived content is still available through Google, but some images likely won't load.
Example: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/02/long-range-wifi-antenna-from-ill...
Question for discussion: it is well within John's rights to do as he wishes with his online property, but what are everyone's thoughts on the _why-esque approach of simply pulling all of one's "shared digital life" off the Internet?
I haven't done anything _why like. There's no drama or mystery. My blog content is still there.
I deliberately put up a 'so long and thanks for all the fish' message on jgc.org because I knew that some people would start to wonder if I just stopped blogging and tweeting.
TBH I'm a bit disappointed this on high up on HN. There's no exciting news here. I'm busy doing other stuff, like working at CloudFlare and existing in the real world.
I think the reason I interpreted this a bit more "heavily" than you may have intended it is simply because of the lack of links to get to existing content on the site.
That, combined with the "signing off" nature of the message and that the site's nav links no longer resolve made it feel like the fact that old content could be accessed at all might have been an accident.
But it's great to know that you'll be keeping it all up there; your blog's content is an extremely valuable resource! Thank you for spending the time and energy on it over the years.
Have changed Blogger settings so that blog.jgc.org shows multiple posts making it more obvious that it's all still there.
> TBH I'm a bit disappointed this on high up on HN.
I have no idea who you are, what you've done or if I've ever read anything you've written. Yet the idea of... retreating from the public side of the internet, or perhaps the internet all together, seems mighty appealing to me. Perhaps others agree, and this is the reason it is high up on HN?
It will probably be available here forever: http://web.archive.org/web/20130806152657/http://blog.jgc.or...
I've seen archive.org content disappear, it's good but not perfect.
I think they work off of current robots.txt so if you purchase a domain name update the robots.txt to not allow archive.org they delete the entire history.
Which sucks in an archival perspective.
Yeah, they really ought to work from the version of robots.txt archived along with a given snapshot. If the legal owner of the content wants it taken down, they can submit an explicit request for that.
> ... the _why-esque approach ...
It kind of sucks as a user/reader but I can see where people come from.
I at least hope if people have useful content they keep it up and if not hopefully that content exists in a permissive license: http://diveintohtml5.info/
We'll probably see many more people want to disconnect for periods of time in the future on a more frequent basis as users grow older.
Poster here, didnt mean any disrespect by sharing this.
I think it shows a lot of strengh and courage doing this. I think most of us will have a moment in our life where we need to experience something new, something else and need more time. Time is so precious.
For me, it is just comforting knowing that it is possible to get out of that loop and that I am not the only one with that pressure.
That's a shame, I can recall some great posts there, particularly the "Climategate" ones that actually investigated tech aspects of the story no proper journalist would bother with.
The posts are all still there.
My site went down back in May(?) when TextDrive mishandled what was apparently the final switchover from Joyent. I thought I was going to get it back up quickly, but I've left it down, realizing that while occasionally my site came in handy when I wanted to look something up, overall it was work. Also, my blog had been up for nearly 15 years and I felt I didn't need to keep a permanent record for the world of everything I've ever written. I've come to embrace the temporariness of things.
bm9jYXJyaWVyQGpnYy5vcmc= Is the base64 if you want something copy-pastable.
Alternatively, nocarrier [AT] the domain of the post.
Love the filename.
+++ ATH
Ah the good old days.
What will you be doing with all your free time?
Your posts and comments will be missed. Well-informed, deeply knowledgeable.