11–20 of 53 posts
Maybe add a banner to point to the web archive of the previous site? Life moves on and domains are ultimately rented much like our time here. Having a new business doesn’t stop you from honouring that, in my view.
That way, anyone who ever saved the link or linked to it from a blog would still get through to the content.
I remember reading complaints about that happening. Here's a ten-year-old discussion, for example:
https://archive.org/post/423432/domainsponsorcom-erasing-pri...
Maybe add a banner to point to the web archive of the previous site? Life moves on and domains are ultimately rented much like our time here. Having a new business doesn’t stop you from honouring that, in my view.
Take the time to take snapshots in whatever appropriate method to archive his site, spawn a new static site under the name of "rememberingjoebloggs.whatever" and add a banner to your own site at his old domain at the top saying that you are honouring his life by keeping the site alive at a different address.
Then go and post on Hacker News what you've done and then contact some journalists who want feel good filler content.
Just make sure the person wasn't on a sex offenders register or anything else that would be brand damaging by association.
If you feel conflicted, you could host the original pages in a dedicated directory with a no-index header, and set up a permanent 301 redirect for those pages..? If they end up listed with your own results, it's trivial to get Google to remove them via Search Console (I do this occasionally for my pure HTML website, which has no Google Analytics etc. on it). That way, anyone who ever saved the link or linked to it fr…
I'm not suggesting you'd want to do this, but (theoretical question) is it still possible for the new owner of a domain to get web.archive.org to delete the archived data from that domain, the data created by a previous owner? I remember reading complaints about that happening. Here's a ten-year-old discussion, for example: https://archive.org/post/423432/domainsponsorcom-erasing-pri...
I'm not suggesting you'd want to do this, but (theoretical question) is it still possible for the new owner of a domain to get web.archive.org to delete the archived data from that domain, the data created by a previous owner? I remember reading complaints about that happening. Here's a ten-year-old discussion, for example: https://archive.org/post/423432/domainsponsorcom-erasing-pri...
Wow, that sounds like a horrible idea. It's like the new owner of an ISBN demanding libraries to burn the book previously sold under that ISBN.
The difference between the situations is that I wasn't interested in using the domain myself. Hosting the old site in a subdomain like u/Hard_Space described sounds like a good solution (I'd go for a subdomain rather than a directory, people often don't read further than the slash and it makes it feel like one site, while a subdomain is at the front and feels more like a separate part, especially when given a descriptive name).