eating cucumbers without permission...

I was very annoyed the other day to learn that the PinkHairGreenEyes Yahoo! Group, along with the owner’s account, was mysteriously deleted. No warning, no explanation. The group served as discussion forum and story archive for fans of Harry/Tonks fanfiction, and, indeed, when you put it like that, it seems a terribly silly thing to care about. And I don’t, not really.

It’s anger at impermanence.

At some point in the future I may well want to re-read a story that was archived there, and then I’ll care about the loss of this particular site. Right now, it’s a cumulative thing. It’s partly fear: I’m a little afraid, with the Niemöller-esque complaint that next it could be my group being deleted. Rather irrational, as I don’t have one.

What I am annoyed by, what I regret, is that bookmarks are no longer of any use, if indeed they ever were. It’s the irritaton I feel, as a person who occasionally likes to go back and re-read things that I’ve read before, at knowing that they might well not be there when I go back, and at my sudden, increasing desperation to ensure that it never, ever happens. Change might be inevitable, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

The average life of a web page, or so I hear, is around a hundred days. Most pages are rubbish: people blogging about cats, right-wing lunatics, whatever. You’re on the internet right now, you know what I’m talking about. You’re reading what I’m talking about. Nobody cares when it disappears; probably nobody even notices. And there’s a certain charm to it, a poetry: you appreciate it all the more because it’s ephemeral, because it’s fleeting, because it won’t be there tomorrow. It feels vibrant and alive, like a freshly cut flower. It’s beautiful in its impermanence. But, still, what is good for things you put in vases is not good for information.

I may miss a flower, but am unlikely to need it.

“If you find a quality site,” it’s almost a mantra, “bookmark it.” It’s a virtual bookmark to a virtual page, ready for me to thumb back to it at a moment’s notice, when I have the time, or when it’s required. Not now. Later. In the future. And if the future happens to be more than a hundred days long, well, shit.

Better pages tend to have a longer life, if only because authors don’t like to see considerable effort wasted, but they don’t always have a choice. Pages are often taken down, like this Yahoo! Group, by a third party. At best, the content can be put online elsewhere, but either way the bookmark is still useless. At worst, the content is gone for good.

My solution, at least, is a personal archive. It’s hoarding taken to ridiculous extremes, like a crazed bower bird, but it has its benefits. Slogger is an extension for FireFox/Mozilla that saves every page visited in the browser to the hard drive; if that seems excessive, in manual mode it works just like the “bookmark” button — but saves a copy instead of a link.

Combined with a tool like Google Desktop Search, it’s like having your own private internet archive.