Fifteen years ago, give or take a few months, I set up my first live website. For the first five years, I didn’t do much with it, setting up a few pages about the Titanic movie (!) and a couple road odds-and-ends but not much else.
In November 2001, I set up Iowa Highway Ends there, and in short order it became large enough that I exceeded the 20 MB (!) limit and needed a second sub-site. Soon, I had to start storing photos on my iDisk, requiring a manual re-edit of many pages to create absolute links.
A few years ago, I decided to move everything exclusively to my iDisk, after Angelfire’s interface failed to change. It was more efficient.
But then, last year, Apple lowered the boom. Join iCloud! Apple says. Except there’s one problem — probably because now that everyone uses templates or third-party sites (or, sigh, Facebook) to hold all their pictures and do their page work for them, Apple decided against a web-hosting service.
So ninety days from now, everything at homepage.mac.com/jeffmorrison — more than a decade’s worth of stuff — disappears forever. It might be the biggest purge of the Internet since Yahoo closed Geocities.
That’s why this website was created.
I think I’ve moved everything, and notified everyone I can think of, but there’s only one way to be sure. That’s where the self-imposed “link rot” comes in. The Angelfire pages have remained up, but the accumulation of minor edits to all of them have resulted in un-updated, or worse inaccurate, information.
So today I took a big step. I logged in to Angelfire for the first time in a really long time and found a new interface … that I won’t be interfacing much with. And, in the sub-site, I batch-deleted file after file, files that took untold hours to upload but seconds to go away.
I’m already having second thoughts, but it is one of those things that should be done. In a week or two I’ll go in and delete a chunk again, and hope that everyone who gets a 404 will be able to point to this place.