A kvetch, if you will

A little while ago the sitemeter on my personal website went down, and in the course of resetting it, I discovered that people still visit my website. Like, lots of people. So I decided that maybe it was about time I got around to updating some of it. One of my current jobs is -- well not exactly public, but I do end up talking to people a lot, and so maybe it was about time I made my net presence a little tidier.

So I finally got around to taking the link off my front page for to the BiNetCanada website - a site that I formerly designed and maintained.

BiNetCanada was not my site. I volunteered to set up the web presence for the group when BiNetCanada was first established by one of the local activists. Along with researching resources and events I also paid for the domain and hosting. I posted weekly (mostly) updates about events across Canada, periodically checked and updated the information on all the pages to keep them current and sorted through hundreded of relevent news articles for storage on the site.

Initial plans for BiNetCanada were pretty ambitious. Along with being a country-wide resource, there was talk of publishing a monthly on-line newsletter, of offering hosting services to small-town or rural Pride groups who couldn't afford their own sites, and the process was begun of translating the entire site into a French-language version so it would be available in both official languages.

Well, the newsletter never materialized. I never heard what happened, if anything, to the idea of contacting the small Pride groups. And the translation process ground to a halt shortly after the framework for the French pages were up, my honest response to emails about why it was taking so long was, "The people who volunteered to do the translating are no longer responding to my emails."

So it ended up that the vast majority of the work and all the expense was carried by me. I didn't actually mind, since it felt like I was making a contribution, and I did get some positive feedback from people who found it a useful resource.

Then I started working at two jobs.

And as both my finances and my free time got tighter I found it harder and harder to justify the energy and expense, especially when I was cutting back on so many other things. The paypal donation button on the site never contributed a single penny to offset the costs. So I finally had to tell the BiNetCanada group that I was going to have to give up working on the site.

There was a flurry of conversation among the organizers, but from my perspective it looked like a viable solution wasn't really leaping to the fore. So I made a suggestion that I thought would help to solve the problem: we could put a couple of discreet ads on the site and that would help to offset the cost of keeping it active.

That generated another brief flurry of conversation, along with the assurance that everything was being sorted out. Eventually that died down too.

I sent a few more emails, reminding people that host and domain were expiring and asking to be advised on how to transfer over ownership. No response.

Eventually both expired and the site just went away.

I'm not angry about the way things turned out, but I am really disappointed. I really enjoyed doing it for the few years it was around, I took a lot of pride in doing it. I know that taking time out from everything else to do the fairly monotonous task of weekly updates isn't something that most people want to sign up for. I think, however, that I am kind of bitter that when it came down to the wire, all that anybody had to do was to say, "Yes, do what you think you need to do." and I would have been able to at least try to keep it going. I am bitter knowing that if anybody down the road ever thinks to ask, "Hey, whatever happened to the website for this group?" the answer they are most likely to get is, "Oh, the maintainer decided she didn't want to do it any more."

I have everything backed up on disc, but the longer it languishes, the smaller the chance gets that the site will ever be revived.

I guess it wasn't so valued a resource after all.