As an early web design and usability practitioner, I have a long held a strong principle against linkrot, and maintaining the past for future appreciation. This is not a universal tenet. Some of the world’s best websites have been lost to history, which is a shame. Great examples of website preservation do exist—look up a late-1990s topic on cnn.com, for example, and you’ll get the original layout, which is amazing. (And, of course, Space Jam.)

The difference between those sites and mine, of course, is that mine contains, well, a lot of mildly embarrassing stuff. I’m not the same person I was when I started blogging as a 25-year-old web designer. Still, I’ve never taken anything down; most of what’s gone missing is due to poor database management.

Occasionally, this makes for fun reading. Tonight, discussing a written school assignment with my 11-year-old son, I started digging around my archives to show him examples of how writing could be fun. And it was: in my archives are all kinds of expositions, from travelblogs of places he’s been with me to ridiculous stories of my experiences and my childhood. We both laughed a bunch while reading.

So, dear reader, while this site is not as busy as it used to be, rest assured that it’s not going anywhere, either. My archives will stay where they are, and the old page layouts will stick around, too (not least because they’re hard-coded). New posts will appear as they may, as they always have. And someday, probably fairly soon, my kids will discover the really cringe-worthy stuff in my archives, and I’ll have some explaining to do… but it will be worth it.