When I was starting my first company, Design District, I spent some time as a photo grip for a Cincinnati photographer named Gordon Morioka. Gordon recently passed away.

While everyone who knew Gordon would agree that he was an absolute joy to work with and an amazing photographer, the purpose of this post is not to eulogize him. One of the first websites I ever built was a quick portfolio site for Gordon and this site is still available online as I write this.

This community will certainly miss Gordon, but his passing (along with this episode of The Big Web Show) has really gotten me thinking about what will happen to the web content which I maintain when I pass. While I don’t offer hosting to many folks, I do host a few websites for friends and Gordon was one of those. His site is still live on my server. I will gladly continue to host this site as a memorial for Gordon. But, I don’t control the domain name… At some point it’s going to expire and this site will disappear.

I’m not asking for answers, necessarily. This has just made me think about the temporary nature of the web. It’s really only been here for just over a decade and all the content that’s been written in this time will, at some point, face this same scenario.

So much effort has been put into generating this content, I would hate to see this fall away. How can we keep it alive?