Ok I’m not starting any more projects. At least not top-level projects. From now on I’m only finishing projects or killing them.
Conversation
My biggest achievement of the last couple of years was effectively ending Refactor Camp the conference on a graceful high note. Second biggest was handing off the refactorcamp dot org the mastodon server to someone more able to keep it going
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Feeling very post-mid-lifey, leeward sloping. Turned 46 last week. Maybe act 1 is starting all possible projects, act 2 is shutting them down at the natural times.
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Relatedly, no more domain names. Done. And unused ones will expire. Subdomains okay if they’re logically subprojects of continuing projects. For a couple of in-dev projects that haven’t yet launched, I’ll use subdomains.
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The web makes it surprisingly hard to shut down projects. Last year I pulled all the tempobook blog posts into ribbonfarm and perna-redirected the domain. Janky operation. There’s no ideal solution. The web at best understands permanent redirects, not endings.
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I didn’t actually do a 301. I just did a regular redirect and had the ribbonfarm Wordpress install handle the other domain as well. The alt was some horrible screwing around with web server rewrite rules. I realized I only needed to not let links break. Screw SEO.
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This is also the reason lately I have been doing un-headlined, Julian-dated blog entries (or blogchains that share a title and differ only by number). To name a thing is to make it an independent project in at least a small way. Unnamed things are easier to merge, remix etc.
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Generally I’m also going from being apathetic to SEO to actively antagonistic to it. Search-based discoverability is overrated for most things. It’s never been a significant source of new readers for me anyway.
