By mothballing I mean: I've stopped updating, I've disabled further comments and the front page has just one story on it, but it's all there and indexed. I don't intend to delete stuff from the Internet as I know there are many people who read the old stuff I wrote (thousands of page views per day).
If anything has broken I would like to know about it as that's not what I wanted. I just wanted to be free of the responsibility of coming up with new stuff. My life is so full that it was getting neglected and so I decided to prune rather than let it wither.
Example: http://blog.jgc.org/2012/02/long-range-wifi-antenna-from-ill...
Question for discussion: it is well within John's rights to do as he wishes with his online property, but what are everyone's thoughts on the _why-esque approach of simply pulling all of one's "shared digital life" off the Internet?
I deliberately put up a 'so long and thanks for all the fish' message on jgc.org because I knew that some people would start to wonder if I just stopped blogging and tweeting.
TBH I'm a bit disappointed this on high up on HN. There's no exciting news here. I'm busy doing other stuff, like working at CloudFlare and existing in the real world.
That, combined with the "signing off" nature of the message and that the site's nav links no longer resolve made it feel like the fact that old content could be accessed at all might have been an accident.
But it's great to know that you'll be keeping it all up there; your blog's content is an extremely valuable resource! Thank you for spending the time and energy on it over the years.
I have no idea who you are, what you've done or if I've ever read anything you've written. Yet the idea of... retreating from the public side of the internet, or perhaps the internet all together, seems mighty appealing to me. Perhaps others agree, and this is the reason it is high up on HN?
It kind of sucks as a user/reader but I can see where people come from.
I at least hope if people have useful content they keep it up and if not hopefully that content exists in a permissive license: http://diveintohtml5.info/
We'll probably see many more people want to disconnect for periods of time in the future on a more frequent basis as users grow older.
I think it shows a lot of strengh and courage doing this. I think most of us will have a moment in our life where we need to experience something new, something else and need more time. Time is so precious.
For me, it is just comforting knowing that it is possible to get out of that loop and that I am not the only one with that pressure.
Alternatively, nocarrier [AT] the domain of the post.
+++ ATH
Ah the good old days.
