The Perfect Platform To Fire Back
Adam has some thoughts about what happens when to a weblog when it's over. "It" refers to a romantic relationship, and the weblog refers to the your significant other's weblog that you're hosting. Hosting a weblog—or hosting anything for that matter—for a friend or lover (henceforth collectively known as "the Other") is asking for trouble in the end.
My experience related to Adam's is my duet weblog with a friend, that, in hindsight, was a recipe for disaster. It had a clever title, and the concept was even interesting: a guy from the West Coast of Canada and a girl from the East Coast of the United States just yucking it up. Turned out we started it at a point where our relationship—always platonic—became strained (for reasons both related and unrelated to the weblog itself) and ultimately we stopped the weblog at about the 4 month point. I had certain expectations of what she could and couldn't do and I couldn't keep up with the quantity of her entries. Part of the strain occured when I told her she couldn't post lengthy quotes of copyrighted matieral on the site, and that if she did, she would have to clearly differentiate it from her content. The kicker—and she doesn't know I felt this way—she had the temerity to ask for advice about how to deal with me on the weblog—on web space I pay for. That's the way I interpreted what she wrote, anyway. That's the major risk, as Adam also notes, that you run when you host the personal thoughts of a loved one:
In one situation, a former girlfriend felt that her blog (which I will not be linking here) which I hosted out of my own pocket was the perfect platform to fire back at me for all of the wrongs, perceived and real, that I had done to her. The second situation was less of an overt act and more of a subtle slap where an individual with whom I had a temporary falling out deleted her journal entries, presumably out of spite.
It's funny. A friend commented privately about my and my friend's duet weblog that he would never host somebody else's site, not even for his girlfriend of over 6 years. I never asked him why, but now I understand.
Adam then points out the need to archive content that the person has stored on your server and send it to them when the weblog will no longer be hosted. He says it's important to do so even if the relationship is effectively dead, not to use against the person but to send to that person and immediately afterwards delete it. I couldn't agree more: there's no need to hold the Other's content hostage while your relationship disintegrates. Better off exporting it to a text file, emailing it to the Other, and then deleting it from your server. That way the Other has control over the content so it can be easily republished elsewhere.
Adam's technical advice is sensible, but there are alternatives. For the no-longer-existing duet weblog, which is not only still in search engines but is in the top 10 for her full name, I may be considering deleting it entirely and creating an HTTP error 410 on it. Because of the impermanance of relationships, coupled with the impermanence of the Internet (at least in theory), it's usually a bad idea to host somebody else's weblog unless you're getting something in return for it.
