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Digital Permanence: Death & Data

Doug Belshaw — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 19:29:03 +0000

I’m worried about dying. No, not in terms of my mortal flesh and immortal soul; I’m worried about what will happen to my data when I die. :-p

That may sound a little, shall we say, geeky, so let me explain. There’s two ways you can ‘live for ever’ in this world. The first is to become so famous that people talk about you until the end of time. As that’s difficult for most of us, the second way is more likely. All you’ve got to do with the second way is to pass on your genes (and your surname) to your offspring. I’m doing well with the latter: my son Benjamin Belshaw was born 20 months ago and will, I hope, continue the illustrious Belshaw line. With the first method, however, I’m still struggling.

My problem is this:

Most of my ideas are in the form of writing in the digital landscape (i.e. on this blog or others on the Internet)
Books and other printed matter in the physical realm are a lot more ‘permanent’ at present that writing in the digital realm.
When I die dougbelshaw.com will cease to exist.
Ergo, unless my ideas are so amazing that they become ubiquitous during my lifetime, they will have little impact after my death.

So I’m left with a problem. Should I start writing a book? Is all I’m writing here ultimately futile? Should I be creating static HTML pages so archive.org can index them?

Does this even matter?

Doug’s first world tour!

Doug Belshaw — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 17:02:23 +0000

I was looking at the little ClustrMap in the sidebar of this blog and it amused me that you couldn’t really see any land mass for all the red dots. Those dots indicate locations of visitors: the larger the dots, the more vistors from that part of the world.

If you click on the smaller map, a larger version of it pops up on the ClustrMaps website. Doing this, it got me thinking thatif each one of those dots indicated someone willing to put me up for a night or two, I could actually get my way around the world fairly easily!

Around 650 people currently subscribe to the RSS feed of dougbelshaw.com. Google Analytics reports about 6,500 unique visits per month. For my first world tour I’d like to play it safe and mainly visit English speaking countries. So, erm, who’s going to put me up next summer? :-p

Page Peel Script

Doug Belshaw — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 16:22:58 +0000

Please note that this script is NOT my own work! As I have stated below, I am simply making it available here in case it is taken down elsewhere. I have no idea on how to modify it. Sorry.

If you’re reading this on the blog rather than via the RSS feed, you’ll probably have already noticed the new addition in the top right-hand corner. The way in which the page ‘peels back’ to reveal a link to my educational consultancy business was inspired by a number of sites I’ve seen recently who use it for advertising. It’s remarkably easy to accomplish. Here’s how…

After a few initial searches I thought I was going to have to stump up $8 for the script. Not so. I came across this post which offered the script for free download. I’m providing it in the more compatible ZIP format below in case it becomes unavailable elsewhere.

Peel.zip

The README file explains all, but it’s a very simple process:

Extract the ZIP file.
Edit the small.jpg file to your liking.
Edit the large.jpg file to your liking.
Open peel.js in a text editor such as Notepad or TextEdit.
Search for, and replace http://www.dougbelshaw.com with the name of the site to which you want the advert to point.
Upload the peel folder to the root directory of your website.
Add the following between the and just after the tag in the HTML of your homepage:

You should then see something similar to what I’ve got on this site. Let me know if and when you do something similar!