WARNING: This is a bit geeky & not a happy topic.

This has been on my mind for sometime. It happened when I got a horrendously large hosting bill from my now former blog-host and then again when I needed to figure out how I was going to share the dozens of images and several videos I’d taken during my Christmas vacation in Hawaii in 2023 because I didn’t want to exceed my storage limits. In 2024 I spend $1,038.35 on web hosting and my Internet domain registrations, up $64.22 from the $974 I spent in 2023, which was up $127.34 from the $846.79 that I spent in 2022. Whatever happened to the days when I had a WordPress blog with unlimited storage for free. Oh right, that was twenty-years ago and a friend in my doctoral program at Pepperdine set me up on one of her servers for free. Damn, that was a life time ago. 

The last few movies I’ve reviewed had pretty heavy messages about legacy and the story of one’s life. That was the original idea when I decided to put together my “Family Photo Project” after my son was taking pictures of the poster of pictures my sister had made for dad’s memorial. It was about telling the stories of these people, and who was going to do that when we’re gone. But when I looked into photography blog themes they were all made for professional photographers selling their images or artist portfolios with one or two images to display. I wanted to share stories from my years shooting festive NASA launches or concerts my friends performed in or from my 40-day cross-country road trip. I wanted to post dozens of images and the stories connected to the images and nothing was really set up for that. And it turns out that hosting images isn’t cheap, and web/blogging platforms that enable hosting images aren’t cheap either. So, there was that problem, the annual cost. This lead to the question, who’s going to pay for any of this once I’m gone?

I’m a writer, it’s not ego necessarily that I would like for my writing to survive beyond my lifetime. I’ve already put in decades worth of work into presenting ideas and stories with images, graphics and videos; what happens to all of that work once I’m gone and no one is paying the hosting fees? Does it become just another broken link on the internet and/or disappear entirely from existence. 

As an atheist I’m resolved with the fact that when my body stops functioning all that I appear to be will be lost. Unlike the pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, I don’t want to “take all of my stuff with me,” but would rather leave it behind so that some part of me might be remembered, like my son taking pictures of images from my dad’s life after he passed. Having fostered a “digital lifestyle,” what gets left behind is more of a challenge than one might imagine. 

This past February my current web host/platform, WordPress, introduced what it’s calling “Our 100-Year Domains and Plans.” They spelled out all of the challenges of setting up or even imagining a digital legacy with the tagline: “The Internet never sleeps, and neither should your website.” Then they presented the following promo video:

Nicely sentimental video that doesn’t share anything about how this is supposed to work. In the article (linked here  and below) they spell things out. Here’s what they’re offering:

  • Special numbered trust accounts
  • Contingency planning for digital security
  • Standalone 100-Year Domains
  • Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe (LOCKSS) principle storage
  • Commemorative website placard. 

That seems pretty comprehensive and complete. One thing that’s missing, are there storage limitations (the thing that got me dinged several times, given my image library…). Oh yeah, and how much are we talking about as far as the cost for this plan? Hold on to your butts, boys and girls, because the cost for this plan is a mere $38,000. Is that all? Why not begin with that number? Oh and if you just want their special 100-year domain service (no hosting) it is a one-time cost of $2,000. Damn. How much have I already spent on this endeavor? There has got to be a better way to do this? 

When I started working on the short story project last week I pulled out journal entries from the1980s and spent a couple days working with just some entries from December of 1985 that were in PDF form but wouldn’t copy & paste without lots of editing. And I know that I have handwritten journals that go back to 1976. A lot of that writing is embarrassing, hopelessly repetitive and would be a form of punishment to whomever would bother to read through them, but it would be nice to ensure their survival beyond a random dust bin when I kick the bucket. So, while I continue the Short Story project, I’m thinking about how to preserve and organize this life time of writing. 

First, I want for all of it to be digitized in some editable format so that it can be better organized and stored in multiple location (the latter to increase the possibility of survival). Second, while I want it all digitized, it doesn’t all need to be “shared.” No one wants everything. During a troubled time in the 2000s I shared my private posts with two trusted friends as a form of “therapy” but it quickly proved to be way too much for them read through, so I learned that lesson. Write every day, share carefully (or as the old school writers from 100-years ago might have advised: write drunk, edit sober). So I need to figure out some kind of local storing strategy that trusted friends will have access to after my “departure.” Next, “the collection” needs to exist in both digital and hard copy form. I mean, I don’t want some stupid EMP to wipe out my whole writing existence. The videos will be toast, but no reason why the images can’t be preserved. And finally, I need to find a way to do all of this while continuing my current writing projects… meaning that I will probably not be able to post everyday on ye’ ol’ blog, but I will be writing every day on new projects and preserving old ones. I have to acknowledge that I have far less time in front of me than I have already spent making this ridiculous mess. Yay! 

For several years I’ve been doing all of my first drafts in a journaling application called Day One, which is great for writing all of my news/editorial writing intended to show up on my blog. It automatically sync on all of my devices, so that I can start writing on my phone about a movie I just saw immediately after leaving the theater. I currently have over 3,300 “entries” saved in the app, that I had originally organized under the various topics using cute little titles like “Adventures in Education” or “Daily Random Sh*t” or “Meditations On…” Once the first draft is written in the app it’s copied and pasted into my WordPress blog and published. The app is a kind of back up for the blog, though both are synced online. As I began to pull from the pre-Internet journals I thought that I might organize things in the Day One app under the different years when the original was written. But one of the biggest problem with this practice is that all of this material is only accessible using the app and if it were to stop being supported or suffer a serious crash, it’s liable to take everything with it and be inaccessible. That’s terrifying.

Another option is to use a writing application that’s specifically designed for long format projects, Scrivener, that might be much better with the organizing huge amounts of material and creating backups that are accessible outside of the app (as in the digital PDF and printed hardcopies mentioned above). Also, any project can be subdivided or nested into as many sections or chapters as I want. So I can create a “document” containing all of my journal entries from the 1980s and have sections for each year. I kind of like that idea because in the pre-Internet era I would organize my journals and give each year a different title, like 1986’s title was “When Bad Things Happen to So-So People” or 1987’s was titled “Things Other People Were Smart Enough Not to Tell You.” In later versions I could add a bit of design to the yearly journal covers like these (the second even being in color!):

I’m kind of excited about the possibilities, though I still don’t know how I’m going to host or store whatever becomes of all of this. I might have to just secure one of those 100-year domain names and then seed the content across dozens of free websites and then make sure to create local electronic and hard-copy back-ups. I guess it’s true that nothing spurs on creativity as much as limited resources and a challenge threatening something you love to do. This should be interesting. 

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Tags: After I am gone, blogging, life legacy, online impermanence, writing projects

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