I’m 32. So hopefully death is still many decades away. But I still really need to document how I want my family to handle my digital legacy. Especially my websites. I don’t care if my personal files on my Mac disappear. But I’d like my websites to remain online for as long as possible after I die.
Right now I have three sites powered by Hugo and hosted on AWS. They should remain up for a decade or two as long as the $5/mo bill is paid. My biggest concern would be AWS introducing a new login or payment system that requires manually migrating to. A non-techy family member might struggle with that.
I also have my Micro.blog blog. As of today it doesn’t hate enough posts for me to be upset at the prospect of it disappearing. But if I did want to preserve it my main concern would be that Micro.blog could very easily be shut down. Luckily it’s all static pages and is Hugo again behind the scenes, so it shouldn’t be too tricky for a somewhat tech savvy friend/family member to get a copy of it all onto AWS.
My main concern are my Obsidian notes that get turnt into Learnt.me. In many ways that site is the most in-depth digital representation of who I am, so I’d like it to survive after I died. It’s turned into a website via Obsidian’s ‘Publish’ feature. But the site seems very JavaScript-y and not the easiest to have backups of. Luckily all the notes that the site are based on are just Markdown notes. And there’s also at least one other service that offers something like Obsidian Publish. But either way, worse case scenario all my notes could just be uploaded to an Apache web server and be browsed and viewed via the folder hierarchy. However I really like how Learnt.me looks and works. It would be a shame to lose that.
I’m not sure what the best solution is long term. I thought about having all the content hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech. It’s pay as you go, so I could deposit a bunch of money into it. But to be honest, as long as I can find a way for the AWS bill to be paid, that would be the easiest and most reliable route for long term hosting.
But either way, my digital ‘estate’ is in a much more stable long term state than it has been in the past. Sure, I have too many sites, which makes things more tricky. But at least none are powered by WordPress, which would make things very brittle and tough to keep up and running.
