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Most writing about the Web is done from a very short-term perspective. Authors create websites quickly and abandon them almost as quickly. Sometimes the sites are pulled down (leaving everyone who linked to them irritated), or they are left up, as dead sites, unmaintained and full of broken links. In either case, the authors rarely thought about what role their site might play in the long-term unfolding of the Web.

I am in the unusual position of knowing something of what it is like to maintain a website over a long period. This is my sixth year of maintaining a several-hundred-page site on my research and other interests, and a number of surprising lessons have been learned over those years.