I haven’t really made any concrete preparations for the fate of my online presence, but I have told my family to keep my several (huge) websites online after I am gone. I’ve archived these sites on CD (and while my CD-R organization is abysmal, I have no doubt that they’d eventually find a CD marked “WEB PAGE BACKUP.”
My sites all pay for themselves through an association to Amazon.com and other affiliates (actually, they more than pay for themselves) so I won’t be inconveniencing anyone by requesting that they keep the sites going. (And even if the sites stopped paying for themselves, I have some semi-web-savvy relatives who could find a freebie host for the sites to reside.)
Who would you have look at your hard drive though? I am the only one who uses this computer. In the event of my untimely passing I would like somehow to have the entire hard drive self destruct. Perhaps an e-mail to a trusted friend asking them to notify certain communities to which I belong- although most would hardly give a toss anyway.
Maybe it is just better to pass on into the night without touching anyone on the way.
A few years ago Slashdot had a link to a site which was, in essence, a dead man switch. You signed up for the site, and if you didn’t log in for 2 weeks it would send an email to a list of people saying something might be wrong with you.
The problem for me would be that I am a ditz, and would probably forget to check in and then cause a lot of undue problems because of it.
It was an interesting idea and it caused me to ponder how to handle all my online appearances, but truth is, I haven’t done any preparation for it. I suppose I should, perhaps I’ll do that during class today - since I obviously won’t be paying attention.
