What Happened to The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns? from Planck's Constant

Ten or even twenty thousand years ago, when prehistoric bloggers at Lascaux in southwestern France expressed their view of the world onto cave walls, their ideas lasted for millennia. When Egyptian bloggers scratched their hieroglyphic instructions on how to properly circumcise a male or how to make bread on the inside of pyramid walls, those medical blogs lasted for thousands of years.

Today, blogs only last for a handful of months or perhaps a year or two, and then their exhausted authors post fewer and fewer articles until one day there are no more new items. Some blogs, if they are hosted on free sites, like Tor's Rants, for example, just stop with nary a word why. That's not polite.

Some bloggers purposely delete their blog for no good reason at all. Last month I wrote about "Dumb Ox Daily News" blog doing this rather rude thing [When Bloggers Say Goodbye]. Now you may wonder why I care. It is true, I have not met these people and I only know them through their blogs. But I invested my time linking to them and commenting on their blogs; I believe some word more than goodbye is due.

After almost 5 years, blogger Samantha Burns [see a wayback archive view of her blog here] either closed down her blog herself or the hosting site deleted it for non-payment.

It is for this reason I no longer simply link as many bloggers do to an article of interest. My regular readers know that instead of a simple link, I repeat a few paragraphs of a blog post at the bottom of my articles so that when a blog link rots, my readers can still get the gist of what I was linking to. As example, see my post Lots of water like chocolate.

The only exception is when I link to myself. I know that my links will not end up dead. In addition, I host all my images myself. Many of my readers have probably come across websites that link to Flickr photos only to see a message that the photo is no longer available. This will not happen as I do not trust Flickr to remain in business long because it is run by idiots.

I have already paid for ten years in advance for my domain name and I have left a bank account with enough money, a perpetual fund, to pay hosting and domain fees to keep my blog viewable for the next few centuries or longer. If you link to my articles, I have no doubt that they will outlast those of the Daily Kos and many other sites.

I have also prepared my last article, but not to worry, I am not planning on stopping my writing - it's just in case.