Birthday!

No one wants to die and discover that all you have to pass on to the next generation is your Facebook page.

Stephanie Savage, writer-producer, 2010

Any unmaintained website is going down.

Period.

Daniel Walmsley, WCLAX’15
When you go to The Louvre in Paris and look at a painting like the Mona Lisa you’re looking at a small painting on a piece of rotting wood that we care so deeply about the preservation of that we delicately try to preserve that bit of wood, and house it lovingly behind 1.52-inch-thick bullet-proof glass, and at a permanent temperature of 43 degrees Fahrenheit and 50 percent humidity.
Do we care that much about our WordPress websites? Or will the stories of our lives just be so many Citizen Kane sleds burned on the digital ash heap?

Wither WordPress?

Could our WordPress future be the opposite of Dad’s Kodak experience?

  • 👍 Robust Open Source project
  • 👍 Vast developer community
  • 👍 Solid, stable, secure platform
  • 👎 Millions of individual sites that may or may not be updated
  • 👎 Individual sites filled with Themes & Plugins that may develop vulnerabilities sooner or later

The Eastman Kodak Company went bankrupt. But Dad’s Kodachromes are still rich and vivid and vibrant. Could it be that WordPress the platform is solid for years to come, but our individual blogs and websites go down within a year of the end of vigilant maintenance?

Glenn & Sheila Zucman (mom!) on my birthday. Kodachrome slide by Joseph Zucman (dad!)