Once Were Webloggers
The other day I sorted through some old bookmarks of weblogs I used to follow—a more complete version of the pages of blogs I used to maintain here. Over 80% of them were defunct: archived, with depressingly similar farewell posts; or abandoned, with their most recent posts dating back years; or gone altogether. I filed those into folders marked “Hibernating” and “Missing in Action”. The rest, though, were still varying degrees of active, if not as active as most of us were back in the day. Any blog with a post from the past several months I considered a going concern, which is the least I can do when my own blog has sometimes barely matched that. Not many seem to be posting daily, though (not that I blame them), so even a curated collection of ye finest weblogges is no match for the Skinner-box hit of Twitter.
Several also seem to have got snarled up in Google’s push to deprecate http-served pages (as discussed by Shelley Powers of Burningbird, another old blogging hand who’s still at it). I fear that I’ll have to face that time-suck of site-maintenance soon, too, or see the ’snail sink even further into obscurity.