The Future of Side Projects

I’ve been a digital hobbyist for almost 50 years, from my days fooling around with a TRS-80 Model One (on which I coded a video game, in BASIC, called “Galactic Warrior,” and then parlayed my skills into my first coding job) through to my experiments with everything from energy data to ship positions.

Along the way, I’ve accumulated a collection of websites that serve various roles. As I age, as these websites age, and as I recentre my life on analog over digital, their maintenance becomes less a “things I do while procrastinating” and more “annoying obligation.” 

So I’m in the midst of a downsizing project, seeking to strip out what’s not needed, find a new home for things that are best housed elsewhere, and to preserve things that deserve preserving.

Here’s what I’ve achieved so far (I’ll update this list as I make progress).

Migrated

• WhatsMyLot.com, a single-page website that lets you find out what lot you’re in on Prince Edward Island, from you phone’s location, got migrated to a new server, and will live on. I created it in 2014 as an unofficial side project to the Samuel Holland map repatriation festivities. 
• CaminoFrances.info, a single-page companion website to Bryson Guptill’s book about walking the Camino, is similarly on a new server, and will live on.
• TheIslandWalk.info, a similar single-page site showing the route of The Island Walk, has a new server too. I’ve been updating it regularly, with Bryson’s help, and the underlying data is available on Github.
• I migrated the Crafting {:} a Life website, which supported our 2019 unconference of the same name, from a Drupal site to a static HTML site, for posterity.
• CatherineHennessey.com is, I expect, one of the oldest handcrafted PHP sites you’ll come across. Catherine wrote a blog there from 2000 to 2003. It has a new server too.
• QueenSquarePress.ca and Reinvented.net, my “corporate” websites, didn’t really need dedicated sites of their own, so they now simply redirect to pages here.
• My personal wiki.ruk.ca site, which I created after I came home from Reboot for the first time in 2005, was running a very old “you can’t really upgrade easily” version of the same MediaWiki software that runs Wikipedia. As I stopped updating it a long time ago, I simply wrapped an HTML wrapper around the Internet Archive’s latest snapshot.
• HaroldStephens.net was a Drupal 5 site (!) long past its natural lifespan that I created many years ago for my late friend the adventurer and author Harold Stephens. The DNS still points my way, but I don’t control it any longer. The site will retire when my legacy server retires; after that, the Internet Archive Snapshot will preserve it.
• opencorporations.org and it’s redirected companion closedcorporations.org, held snapshot of PEI corporate registrations from 2008. I’ve shut down the public search site, but exported the raw data should others find it useful for historical purposes. 

In Progress

• A collection of energy-related tools and archives — consuming.ca, pei.consuming.ca, energy.reinvented.net — remain in place. They remain valuable tools, and I would, ideally, find new homes for them, where they can be maintained permanently.
• Sites for a couple of pro bono clients — PEILegion.com, RoyJohnstone.com —  maintained still in Drupal 7, need new homes and/or migrations to Drupal 10.

I expect I’m not alone, being among the first generation of Internet citizens, now in our 50s and 60s, looking at digital things through this lens.