Looking back, it was a great run. Over ten years of blogging by several dozen friends. We started from nothing and we rode the wave, riding high in through the first boom and bust of the internet.

Then Facebook and the iPhone came along and attention wandered. There wasn’t as much a need for online diaries. Things changed and we took our eye off the ball. One by one, people went other places to talk and share.

And I grew more private. The guy who had a webcam in his den and then bedroom for years, the guy who wore a camera for his Master’s thesis, the guy who shared every bit of his life, stopped. There is more than one reason for this, but it happened. And I think it happened across the internet — privacy became a real thing.

Jump forward to now. We haven’t posted to here in almost a year — any of us. Traffic still comes, but it’s a roller coaster ride of odd search terms, churned up. We’re usually a pass-through, pointing to some other site.

The question comes up — what to do? Leave the site up, unchanged? Hope the tides shift back to us? Archive it? Pull it down entirely, relegated to a zip file on a harddrive?

The past several months has seen an insane increase in hacking attempts on the site. Stupid defacements and weird hacks on the user accounts. I’ve locked it down somewhat, but I don’t really have the time or motivation to deal with it daily.

It’s not what I want out of the site, out of the system.

So I think I’ve finally reached a conclusion on what to do with the site.

I’m going to archive it. And start over. As a document of ten years online, the site is amazing. 7,400 posts. 25 different authors. Spanning 2000-2011-ish.

We had an excellent ride and whatever I throw up here next, wherever it goes, in whatever direction, will be fun as well.

And if, for some reason, it’s something you want to be a part of, let me know. I can tell you that for all of my frustration with the “community” of the internet these days, I’m a long way from done with it.