This whole thread is giving me feels, but to the basics, I'll tell you how it happened.
I'd been writing about what we came to call social media since the early 90s (alt.culture.usenet and alt.folklore.urban ftw), but by the middle of last decade, all anyone wanted to talk to me about was marketing on Facebook, which was the boringest possible topic.
At the same time, my wordpress host had lousy security, and my site was getting frequently disabled because of some malicious javascript uploaded through some hole they hand't patched. I wasn't writing there anymore, so it was pure cost at that point, and cost of my time, not just dollars.
Then I moved to Shanghai for several years, working on other stuff, and fixed the site a couple of times again, and one time, my host was like "We disabled your site!" because of their own security flaws had let it get hacked again, which, the whole thing had entered 'ugh field'territory.
I never decided to let the site lapse, I was just tired of dealing with it, and the political circumstances in both China and the U.S. seemed much more urgent than rescuing some historical essays, so one day at a time of not dealing with it became years.
And here we are, me reading my own eulogy. Which is incredibly flattering and touching, I have to say.
I'm not even sure what of it can be resuscitated -- maybe if I want it back, I'll have to copy it from Wayback (and will say "Thank you Brewster", not for the first time), but if anyone here has advice about competent and secure hosting for an old Wordpress blog, hmu at cshirky@gmail.com, because reading this, it makes me embarassed not to have just fucking fixed this a year or two ago.
And thanks, all, for this thread. -clay