Well, according to Linux.com, I never existed …
I spent a few years of my life moonlighting as a writer for Linux.com, a volunteer run open-source website. My wondergeek friend Heather got me to write a few articles, which became a few dozen articles, which became me running the hardware section. I think I wrote over 40 articles within two years, not to mention a presentation on the 2.4 kernel at LinuxWorld 2001 in New York and numerous IRC help sessions.
But Linux.com changed. OSDN, the parent organization, was run by another parent organization. That parent had some financial problems and decided to reset Linux.com. I hadn’t writen as much for the website, but I stopped writing for good at that point (there was a messy layoff, people were fired with no notice, new management wanted to change a working system … not a pretty sight). So all the volunteers were run off and the site became a portal for another news site.
Recently I noticed that I didn’t have a good archive of all of my work. A lot of my articles got edited before posting (some for the better). I had downloaded my Tux Noir articles in the hopes of starting a new website, but I never got the time to finish that project. I went to Linux.com today to search for my articles … they were all gone. The entire hardware section, along with other portions of the old Linux.com, are no longer present. Searching for my name in the database only returns but dead links.
Websites change, but I’m a bit sad that all of that work is no longer accessible. Thousands of volunteer hours got removed from the face of the internet with a few MySQL statements (remember, I wasn’t the only person working on that website). It’s scary to think that we could loose so much history because it only exists in the wired, never escaping into the real before somebody pulls the plug. How long before the past becomes one giant 404 error?
I think it’s time to back siliconchef.com up … perhaps to paper this time. I apologize in advance to the trees, but it might be the only way. If I ever revive Tux Noir, I need to put him on the case of the missing articles. I hope I can find him still living in the wired.
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