Some of my projects eventually found their way back to the sea.

Servers gone, domain names that no longer resolve.

Some exist in a near-original form, chugging along. Some have been redesigned on top of the same foundation, and others rebuilt on different tech stacks.

What kind of web projects have you contributed to or been responsible for? Are any of them still online? All of them?

Caring too much about some of my projects has made them harder to let go of.

Not because of old code I’d eagerly shovel into a fire so nobody could see it, but the end of a story about building with people.

A site evolving into its next form is usually something to celebrate regardless of my involvement.

A site going away has usually been a ripple following the more seismic change. A business got acquired or folded. A solo professional retired. Someone died.

It’s not my place to tell other peoples’ stories, but they’re linked to these internet contraptions we built.

Not all the time—I did jobs that came and went—but often enough.

One of my earliest clients, a sharp, generous, and badass woman, called not long ago to ask me what I was doing and tell me she was retiring from her long and successful career. I was touched that she called to chat, and even more that she let me play a supporting role for so long.

This hadn’t been a job, but careful work and many conversations and connections to other people. Long ago, she saw fledgling me attempting to run a business and offered advice from her own experience.

“I want you to familiarize yourself with this word,” she said matter-of-factly over the din of a coffee shop. She penned something on a napkin and slid it to face me.

It said “No.”

Many years later, I can put myself in that moment and hold it against my slow progress with boundaries and warning signs and finding better opportunities by saying no to worse ones. I had to do it wrong anyway, but she had a lot of gentle and good-humored advice that would later reveal its value.

So it happened with her site, like it did for a few others: we took a metaphorical steam roller to it. Separated it from the CMS, got it onto a CDN, transitioned to relative stasis.

Each of these flattened sites could be left to endure instead of languishing on an old server with outdated software.

That’s like leaving an open bag of peanuts out in your yard. It’s only a matter of time before the birds and squirrels and raccoons find out and leave a mess. Strewn peanut husks and link spam.

This steamrolling is especially easy to do with a static site or headless front end. Make any last updates, toss the head (?), and hope you never find a typo you can’t live with.

This could be a fun challenge sometimes, whether it meant generating a static copy of a site or completely rebuilding a smaller project. (I never did this with a massive, highly-dynamic site that would have been a puzzle.)

I even thought about promoting flattening as a service, which seemed like a doomed business plan. I did this with sites I already knew, and sometimes quietly did the bulk of it for free despite my self-pact to stop doing work for free in secret.

Plus I wouldn’t want someone to have to pay for this. I’d want it to be free or extremely inexpensive so anyone could freeze an old site and keep it around. And yeah, I know that sounds an awful lot like archive.org.

I have bad business ideas all the time, I just don’t tell you about most of them.

Now that we’re in the final stretch of February, with only one digit needed to count the remaining days, I should probably tell you that I’ve had a rough plan for these posts.

I broke the month loosely into weeks, each having a guiding focus that built to the next: my content, social content, business content, and we’ve just capped a zooming-out to long-term care.

I hope this makes sense in hindsight or even that it was obvious. Not like when a kid shows you a squiggle and tells you it’s a castle and you smile because you’re nice and you know they’re working their shit out.

Every day I’ve tried to find a story to tell you, because database schema could bore anyone and I actually do not know how this ends because maybe it’s not building websites on the internet! This clown may fall off the tightrope and go try to sell roughly-axed furniture.

So even though it’s not the end of a calendar week anywhere, we boldly turn toward our final chapter as I wonder aloud where all this content is going.