so, farewell then

It looks like my beloved old website might be ceasing its existence, mostly because I can't really justify spending $130 renewing it this year. I'm not sure what this will mean for the site, but I suspect it may be going offline shortly. Which is a great shame, since I've had it for over ten years now. But on the other hand I haven't exactly been using it to its full extent. Certainly not to $130-worth of extent.

So I've spent my weekend hurriedly downloading the various content off the site and saving it to my hard drive. To be honest, I've not used the site as a proper website - I've used it as a dumping ground and/or backup area. Sorting through it has been like dragging boxes out from under the bed. You never really know what's in them.

I've mentioned that I'm a hoarder, right? Turns out it applies to virtual content as well.

In the assorted boxes of my old website, I've found a vast and varied array of crap. There are at least three of my trunk novels, for a start, which were at one point (shamefully) available online but which had their links disabled some time ago. There're also hundreds of pictures, drawings, scraps of writing, webcomic pages, and random things I'd completely forgotten existed.

I'd forgotten, for example, a series of semi-fictionalised stories I wrote ten years ago about me and my friends, featuring an account of the time I attempted to ask out the man who would later become my husband. Boy, I'm glad that's still in existence. I'd forgotten most of my WWE fanfiction. I'd forgotten I spent a period of time dressing up teddy bears in hilarious costumes and making a calendar of them.

It's taken me approximately six hours just to download all this random content. How many hours did I put into creating the site? It's just ridiculous. Especially considering that the majority of it wasn't accessible to the general public, it was just a mess of untitled pages and dead-end links. I'm considering copy-pasting all of the stories, fanfics, terrible poems and the rest into one big document just to get an idea of the volume of word count that's there.

I've always argued that you need to write a million words of crap before you start doing anything good. My old website might be the proof of that.

So, anyway, it looks like it might be farewell to the old applepastie site. On the plus side, it may be the impetus I need to create something better. Something I might update every now and again.

Although, I suspect if I got a new site, the first thing I would do is to upload all the old crap back onto it so it's not cluttering my hard drive. Because, hoarder.