I have spent most of the past 24 hours preparing the online launch of Erewhon 2.0. specifically, the launch of this blog which has links to everything else. A major Web 2.0 idea is to use other people’s sites, both commercial and non-profit to spread one’s work on the web.

This blog is a prime example: Instead of designing all my own individual web pages from scratch (as I do on the main Sporkworld site, but that means it is rarely updated) or even running open-source blogging software on my domain (as I do in the Sporkworld Community, which has never become a community because it is too hard to contribute to and maintain), in this blog I use Tumblr, a free (but commercial) service to host the blog content. I also (this is an aspect that some new bloggers may be unaware of) use their software to build the pages, so that I depend on Tumblr to create my pages. This makes everything easy for me, but it is frightening…

My first ever website (on which I translated some poems by Baudelaire and read them in French and English) died overnight without notice when Yahoo bought Geocities, where my site was hosted. I was so innocent then that I did not know one needed to maintain local copies of material one has online, so when Yahoo pulled the plug, only some traces were left behind, along with copies (made with attribution but without permission) made by a mysterious Russian. This story is told in full in Attic/Sótão, a now-very old installation on obsolete computer art on Regina Célia Pinto’s site The Museum of the Essential and Beyond That.

I am no longer so innocent and I do make my own backups and store everything I can think of on my own site and/or on my local hard disks but it is inevitable that outside sites only become truly useful as you become dependent on them.  While I can save my completed blog pages made on the Tumblr, I can’t make any new pages in the same style (at least not automatically by filling in forms) if Tumblr is down or, God Forbid, out of business. (The latter is no joke, because AFAIK, Tumblr, like most Web 2.0 success stories, has millions of users but no way to make money…)

My fear was newly aroused because as I was working, I kept getting notices from Tumblr saying to try again later or apologizing for maintenance.  But as these notices were intermittent I think the system was bogged down rather than deliberately brought down for scheduled maintenance. Worse yet, problems in my pages started to appear spontaneously which had to be due to Tumblr bugs rather than Sporkworld bugs. (If the links on this page are a garish orange instead of purple or green, that is their bug. The orange is a default color, and the colors revert to default settings sometimes for no apparent reason.  I can spend a long time restoring them only to have them revert again, so it isn’t worth fixing, but I am hoping the pages will be correct when I actually announce this blog.

—Millie Niss