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Anil Dash reflects on the monumental role Flickr had in shaping late 2000s-era internet culture (often referred to as Web 2.0) in a deceivingly titled essay on his site:

Flickr is a social sharing site for photography which was founded in 2004, and these days people might say that it shares some of its cofounders with Slack, though back when Slack started, everybody said that the company was started by some of the founders of Flickr. That’s because Flickr was arguably the most influential site of the Web 2.0 era, helping define everything from the user interface design to the bright colors to the easy way that developers could access data from the platform. A lot of the things that we take for granted on the modern social internet, like a friendly ​“voice” used to communicate to users, were pioneered by Flickr, and then quickly came to be considered standard expectations for the apps and sites that followed. It’s hard to imagine that sites from Tumblr to Grindr would have omitted their final ​“e”s without Flickr’s precedent.

Miranj is very much a product of the same ethos. We may have decided to retain all the vowels in our name, but that spirit of the web we strive to uphold in all the work we do has its roots in the friendly, community-oriented, maker culture that we witnessed during Flickr’s hey-day.

While it is nice to see Flickr back in the zeitgeist of late, it is especially heartening to see them turn their focus towards long-term thinking.

The Flickr team at SmugMug did something special with their responsibility about these public works, due to their cultural significance to the world. They made the Flickr Commons, and brought in a team with expertise in digital archiving and community. This is a project of The Flickr Foundation, designed to preserve digital legacies, and begun in collaboration with no less than the U.S. Library of Congress (back before that was an institution under siege.) They are developing a hundred year plan for how to care for these works, which is virtually unheard-of in the digital world.

Archival and preservation of content is another topic of major interest for us. Websites die for a whole host of reasons. Anil touches upon some of these in his essay:

[…] large institutions, especially ones that have developed complex processes for good reasons, like government agencies and big businesses, often have trouble maintaining public-facing web infrastructure over long timeframes. Running a website that millions of people can access requires constant updates and maintenance, guarding against a never-ending onslaught of security challenges (a task that’s rapidly getting more difficult!), and the internal knowledge on how a site was created in the first place often leaves when employees do.

Businesses grow, restructure, wind up shop. We’ve all probably witnessed sites (including ones we had built) shut down. Good to see an organisation build protections for its content against that eventuality.

Most of our attention regarding websites is around creating new ones, but we cannot escape the reality of having to deal with retiring old or existing websites as well. After facing this scenario a few times at Miranj we built a tool to handle the end-of-life stage for websites. This tool attempts to crawl all publicly accessible URLs for a site and create a static archive, much like the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It has a few built-in smarts to detect and capture the many different ways assets are referenced in modern markup. It generates a folder structure that retains clean URLs, as well as intelligently handles URLs with query parameters.

While the tool is not yet publicly available, we have been using it internally and some of the static archives generated by the tool of erstwhile CMS-based sites have been running smoothly in the wild for years.

email hidden; JavaScript is required if you’re interested in archiving a content-heavy site of your own. Always happy to help or exchange ideas around digital archival¹.

If you’re getting a new site made, or getting one revamped, go read ​“How Long Should Your Website Last” by Mike Swartz. Few are clear in their heads if their website is an investment or an expense. This article does a great job at setting the right direction.

Your website has got three core layers: content storage, content management interface, and forward-facing user experience.

The forward facing experience is what most people think of as their ​“website”. It’s the layer that goes out of fashion merely in 18 months. Another other important take away from that article is that the choice of CMS becomes very critical to determine longevity of investment.

A typical content management system controls all three layers together, and they move in lock-step. Not ideal, but that is how things are. Through the life of a website the content types & storage probably won’t change much. Big perceivable changes happen in other two layers. Therefore the content storage layer must be very well considered. A CMS switch later is expensive, especially the data migration effort.

Hopefully this will be discussed in the upcoming CMS Conference.