This blog will have Saturday January 5, 2008 as the date but it is wrong as this is being written the evening of January 6 when my website and blog was up again. The plug was pulled by Net Nation on Friday evening. Net Nation is the company I pay around $16.00 a year to keep my web page name from being used by my doppelgänger.
On January 1, I was invited to a New Years day afternoon gathering at Tim Bray's and his wife. I meant to ask him something that had been on my mind for weeks. The question was in reference to what kept my web page and blog up and or prevented its extinction. A lot has been said that anything you write on the net is there forever. Was this true?
Before the Christmas holidays Marni McLeod, one of the principals of Skunkworks had sent me a friendly letter informing me that while Skunkworks had designed both my web page and blog and hosted me for two years it was time to push me off the nest and I would have to renew my domain name. This I did (in early January, alas). But I never noticed that when I wrote British Columbia in the registration renewal form there was a little flag that said that only two initials were allowed (BC). I pressed send and that was the end of that. On Friday evening when my domain name had expired the folks at Net Nation pulled the plug.
I never really had to ask Tim Bray in the end how wrong the idea is that anything one writes on the net is forever.
What it means really is that just like in a photography one is nobody without a support staff such as Horst Wenzel one's website is utterly dependent on something as simple and "cheap" as the folks at Net Nation.
But also something I cannot forget are the good folks of Skunkworks including lawyer/writer/designer Doug Jasinski (seen above with his typewriter) and Chris Botting, who without me knowing, gave me exactly what I wanted in this web page and blog.
If I had only heeded Marni MCleod's advice to get on with it in December I would perhaps have asked Tim Bray the question, "How tenuous is my presence on the net?" and not believed a word he would have said.
