Time to Say Goodbye?

Today I note this site’s eleventh anniversary. I have no plans to shutter it, but this notice is probably the last of its kind.

In the late Nineties, I ached to have my own website, and by 2004, Microsoft’s FrontPage application (now-antiquated and unsupported) enabled me to relieve the ache.  After some awkward first steps, I settled on a “look and feel” swiped from a color consultancy’s site and filled it with content.

Since text that is pleasant to read on paper via reflected light might cause eyestrain when direct light burns those words into one’s retinae, I chose Verdana Bold for my font and narrow columns.  Also, I vowed that no vendors would “hit up” my visitors. This is not a commerce site, not even “on the side.” No ads, algorithm-selected or otherwise, with their page-disfiguring animations,  spoil my visitor’s mood. 

This site has mainly been a kind of "billboard" for scholarly articles that, at least ten years ago, were somewhat hard to find – unless they were already in one’s personal files. My own had many I thought worth sharing.

As should be obvious, the evolution of the Internet since 2004 has not affected this website. Except for the link to my email, there is no “interactivity.” But technology has rendered this site a quaint irrelevancy in another way. 

Articles of the kind that reside here are simply no longer as hard to find as they once were. That is, this site’s competitive advantage has all but vaporized. University libraries with subscriptions to JSTOR are accessible to researchers, who may, as individuals, purchase subscriptions to that treasure trove. There is no market for my hod-carrying. 

Anyone can have a web site these days – and, it seems, anyone does – but I no longer have ends to which adding to mine regularly is a sensible means. To maintain it actively would be like writing letters with a quill pen and expecting others to wait for their arrival by Pony Express.

In appreciation of the gratitude that some have expressed for this site’s content, however, I will maintain it passively for the foreseeable future. Also, the papers of my friend Hugh Murray have had a “portal” here almost since the beginning, and I would not abruptly deprive them, or him, of that Internet real estate.

Anthony Flood

January 17, 2015