HyperText Log:
Startups get acquired. Walled gardens suddenly shut down. Drop * From --
Everything is temporary.
In 2009, Yahoo destroyed the most amount of history in the shortest amount of time [1] , 15 years worth of amateur created web pages filled with stories, animated GIFs, family photo albums - all full of personalities and soul all deleted.
The average lifespan of a web page is just 92 days [2] yet Yahoo managed to delete almost a Terabyte worth of content just 186 days after Yahoo made it’s announcement. Those who wanted to save their family photo albums could just move them to Flickr - I’m sure that they would be safe there, after all storage doesn’t seem to be an issue. End of sarcasm. Since they offered one free Terabyte [3] of storage, just ignore the fact they were also acquired by Yahoo in 2005.
When hosting your content on a platform that is owned by a private corporation it has the ultimate say over what happens to information, photographs, conversations, and interaction that occurred within that space. [4] So naturally it was a cue to panic when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced Yahoo acquired Tumblr and said “We promise not to screw it up.” [5] in 2013 considering I was hosting my blog on Tumblr.
As the years progressed - I kept promising lying to myself that this year would be the year I finally relaunch my website. Which is why when Verizon purchased Yahoo for $5 Billion in 2016. [6] I refused to post on Tumblr to motivate myself to finally move my blog back into my site which would force me to finally update it after ~9 years.
Welcome to the Reset.
It was time to start over completely. Choose a new typeface, color scheme, redraw myself and make my site responsive. I started playing around with SVG, CSS Grid Layout, etc… and because I was focusing on perfection months started to pass then all of a sudden my hosting renewal bill comes in and my site is mostly unchanged from when I first started my career around 2010.
When the web was young, people would just publish unfinished work all the time so I think I’ll take a page out of the book Creating GeoCities Websites and publish my unfinished site, even if it’s not what I originally intended, because nothing will get done if I keep focusing on perfection.