What happens to our blogs when we die? | Michael Harley

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If Emily Dickinson had written her poems on her Wordpress blog, her host would have deleted them outright when the bill came due. Instead, her sister found 1,800 poems written on paper and stored in a drawer. Words written on paper take an intentional decision to destroy them whereas words written online usually require an intentional decision to keep them. In this modern blogging age how do we make our writing last?

I do not have any important writing on this blog but I do want my family to have access to it after I've shuffled off this mortal coil. Here is what I'm doing to make my site and writing less ephemeral.

When I first started down this path, I thought I'd be able to build my site and configure my hosting such that the site would last for at least 10 years after my passing. As I've tried to figure this out, I think I've determined that there are just too many variables to ensure this will work as planned. My site URL gets a decaying number of years and I must pick which failure mode I can live with.

I think I've been trying to solve the wrong problem. I've been trying to figure out how I can make my website last for a long time, but I really only care that my words are carried forward. That feels like an easier problem to solve, so that's what I set out to do.

The words #

The reason I liked the idea of static sites is that I write my blog posts in markdown, which is a text-based format designed to be universally accessible. In order to support more features, I've extended how my site processes markdown files. For example, an image in a standard markdown file uses a specific format for inserting an image:

<br>But since I want fancy image processing, I use an 11ty shortcode that wants images tagged like so:

{% image "relative-path-to-image.jpg", "Alt text goes here", "(min-width: 50em) 400px, 60vw" %}<br>That means that my markdown files are no longer as universally accessible as I need them to be. So, my very first step is to get my markdown files back into standard markdown. I am writing a new script to transform my 11ty markdown files back into plain, standard markdown. The script copies these plain markdown files to a separate location as the long term, cold storage. A cron job updates this cold storage archive once a month.

Cold storage is its own git repo, separate from my site, pushed to my own git server. That means my normal backup jobs pick it up and send a copy offsite, without me doing anything else. It also means I can hand the whole thing to somebody.

Once I have the standard markdown repo, I can make whatever I want out of it. The first thing is an EPUB, which is really just a zip file full of HTML, packaged up so it opens like a book. I build it with smaller 600px images, which is plenty on a phone or an e-reader. The same cron job that builds the cold storage archive generates the EPUB monthly.

Then the part I'm actually looking forward to: a printed book, once a year. I did the math and it's a real book, not a pamphlet. 2026 is sitting at 49 posts and roughly 24,500 words with five months still to go, so a full year probably lands around 35,000 to 40,000 words. That's somewhere between 130 and 160 pages.

Plenty doesn't survive the trip to paper. Links turn into dead strings. Comments vanish. My video posts have nothing to show. But a book on a shelf doesn't need a domain, a host, a password, or an internet connection. Nobody has to remember a URL. It just sits there being a book until somebody picks it up.

That's the drawer.

Somebody has to know #

Dickinson's sister knew where to look. Without her, the drawer is just a drawer.

So the EPUB goes onto a USB stick, and the stick goes into my fireproof safe, right next to the "oops I'm dead" binder my family already knows to open. I swap in a fresh stick once a year. Nobody has to be told where my writing lives, or handed a URL, or walked through cloning a git repo. Just read the binder and I'll explain everything there.

What I considered and rejected #

Here are a few things I considered but ultimately decided against.

Prepaying ten years of hosting. This was my original idea. Ten years of VPS is about $900, and I could just park it. The problem is I have no way to ensure that my VPS at Capsul would survive ten years. They might go under or be sold off. I could switch to a bigger provider like Digital Ocean but there are still many variables with a hosting plan that is difficult to plan around.

A dead man's switch. I was imagining some sort of prompt, delivered through email that I would click to extend another year. If I failed to click it, then this automation would migrate the site somewhere free and post the "if you're reading this, that means I'm probably dead or in jail. Either way, I'll not be posting anymore!" type of message. The problem is it inherits the same problem I built it to solve....