@mfowler @timbray That's great advice for people who know they're going to continue actively caring about their blog for the long-term, but I'm hoping to find a safe default for people who might get inspired, blog for a few months / few years, then lose interest - but still want the content they write to stay online effectively forever

My hunch is that expired domains are an extremely common reason for personal content to blink out of existence

@Dtl Blogger has been around forever, but Google's track record of keeping things running (even things that have been around forever) is still bad enough that I don't trust it - especially since they seem to have lost interest in further developing Blogger over a decade ago

@mikemccaffrey @natbat "digital columbariums" is a fantastic turn of phrase, love that!

Since it's my birthday today, I asked @natbat if she could set me up a non-profit foundation which works as a co-operative where people can pool resources and donate their domain name and cash to keep it maintained (and static files served from it) forever, with a board of directors that appoints their own successors and keeps the thing running in perpetuity without it depending on any single individual

She said she already got me a new watch

I don't trust Medium because they added a paywall / registration wall to content that had previously been published

Substack are too young to have proven themselves as long-term trustworthy stewards of content

I used to trust Twitter for long-term content availability, but then they got bought by someone who clearly doesn't care about that at all (and threads are now hidden behind registration walls)

If someone wants to start a blog, and they'd like the content they publish to stick around on the internet for as long as possible into the future, what are their best options?

Buying a domain is tricky because domain names expire

GitHub Pages is pretty great, because GitHub is free and has, to-date, a great track record of not breaking *.github.io content

What are other great options? WordPress.com I think are good on this front

I don't trust anyone with less than 10 years of track record

I have a hunch that domain names eventually expiring is one of the top causes for blog content to become unavailable in the long (10+ year) term, but I don't have any actual data to back that up, just an intuition - partly based on how many of the things I've linked to from my own blog in the 2000s no longer exist

If there is a better Christmas movie than The Muppet Christmas Carol, I don't know what it is

Michael Caine: "I'm going to play this movie like I'm working with the Royal Shakespeare Company. I will never wink, I will never do anything Muppety. I am going to play Scrooge as if it is an utterly dramatic role and there are no puppets around me."

Legend.

@jrdmb @mcnees I am a long-term fan of that particular folklore classification system!

I thought about using it for the tags on my blog

@jrdmb @mcnees OK well this was quite fun! https://chat.openai.com/share/23a225e8-1c30-4eb5-aba3-1d928b8ffd4f

It's called Miracle Workers. It's a bit like Blackadder in that each series features different characters in a different time in history, but played by mostly the same actors

The Oregon Trail is series three, but there's no need at all to watch the series in order (though I really enjoyed series one and two as well)

TBS/HBO released a TV comedy series based on the Oregon Trail video game, starring Daniel Radcliffe and Steve Buscemi

I feel like not enough people know that