I was tempted to steal someone else's idea of compiling my cover letters and putting them into NaNoWriMo's wordcount, to see if I wrote a novel's worth of introductions yet, but I feel like that would be cheating. After all, it'd be a very strange autobiography of sorts, wouldn't it?
If I were to do another autobiography, I'd do so by trying to compile my various blog posts from the multitude of different social sites I've been a part of since... well, since social sites have existed, really. It'd still be largely incomprehensible, of course, but it would at least give me an opportunity to save these thoughts from the webrot that seems to be starting to affect older sites. You begin to take for granted that some of your older content will be available online for all time, but sometimes, when you go looking for it, you find that it's been painted over by new code, the old content wiped clean.
The first time this really hit home was when I went looking for an old picture.
It wasn't a particularly nice picture, mind you. It was a random shot of an apartment I had in Florida with a friend of mine. In frame of the picture was a painting by my Great Uncle, a woman in nude, painted in green. That painting was something of a centerpiece of wherever I was living at the time, all the way to my time in New Orleans. But when Katrina was bearing down on the Big Easy, my wife and I thought it best to get out of town. We hastily packed what we could and drove, of all places, to Florida to avoid the hurricane. It was only part-way down the contraflow that I realized that I had left the painting behind.
No traffic allowed back in. Too bad, so sad. The storm probably wouldn't be that bad, though, right? It'll be there when you get back.
And it wasn't that bad! Well, not where we were staying, anyhow. Apparently the damage to our apartment was minimal, and our belongings remained largely intact. However, the landlords of that apartment felt that we weren't returning - which, we weren't, at least not permanently - and quickly curbed what we had left, despite the moratorium on things like that. The Green Lady was gone.
It's my hope that someone loved it, and it's hanging up in their house now, rather than becoming compost. But, there likely wasn't a huge run on art, in the weeks directly after Katrina. But the one thing I did have, I recalled, was a single picture of it, from an old apartment, sitting on Webshots. Maybe I could recreate it somehow - a poor facsimile, but at least something to honor the painting.
No such luck. Webshots had been bought out by another company only weeks before I had attempted to check, and in their buyout they wiped all the old accounts and associated pictures. Webrot had cleaned the slate. My only digital reminder was gone, effectively, forever. Maybe it exists on some hard drive sitting around in storage somewhere, but I've had no luck so far. Now all I can do is remember it.
And so it goes with other sites. I learned recently that one of my favorite social sites, Turntable.fm, is closing come December 2nd. It was a great place to learn about new music, and now they're moving onto a live-streaming venue, despite the success of the site. There are alternatives, of course, but, you've invested time, and in some cases, money to these sites. Digital media isn't supposed to be something you lose forever, not if you have enough backup. But as people move onto leaving their thoughts and memories on websites, it's just as susceptible to damage as anything along the path of a hurricane.
I imagine the ruins of Facebook, broken albums and missing posts, years from now, with no record of them save for the odd screenshot that was passed around after it went viral. And even those are hosted on imgur.
So maybe the answer to webrot, aside from extensive backup, is to gather up what you like, and put it in a book. Add it to your word count while NaNoWriMo's site is still functional.
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