I love these ideas, and have been planning to do more with my own personal website as well. It’s interesting how the personal website entered a little “winter” phase when social media sites came along and essentially gave everyone a blog (albeit a homogenized one, littered with ads).

Don’t get me wrong—-I do enjoy some social media communities, and some of those services get a lot right, demonstrate how easy publishing can be, and show how much good UI design can help. But I think there’s still a hunger for content on the free and open web, and folks with independent sites can help lead the way to that renaissance. Commercial media sites certainly aren’t going to do it.

One thing, though, is that when I die, I will no longer be able to pay my web hosting bill, and my website—-including all the content going back to the beginning—-will simply fade away. Maybe that’s not a bad thing, but it’s something to consider. On FB, people who die may be memorialized forever (or for at least for as long as FB remains an entity). I wonder if some web hosts would consider offering “hosting for eternity” for an up-front lump sum, or if an organization would ever emerge to subsidize such a service. Something like Archive.org’s Wayback Machine comes to mind, but a service that would archive at the original, canonical URL.

Keep up the great work!