to vampire or not to vampire2004.05.17

As some of you know, I ran another large web site called Pathway to Darkness from '96 to 2000. It was about vampires; anything and everything to do with vampires. The last couple of years were intensely fun, somewhat financially rewarding but also an incredible drain on my personal time. But it was my baby. I had a huge legion of incredibly loyal visitors, I enjoyed a decent amount of local and community fame, and I learned more than half of what I know today building and nurturing that site into the powerhouse it became.

To ease the pain of the mainly manual site I'd built, I took three months and built myself a home-grown CMS that would cut my maintenance time in half. Everything went into the database. A huge redesign was planned and executed alongside the CMS build.

And then, three things happened.

1. The dotcom crash and resulting southbound swoop in ad sales meant I saw my ad revenues cut by nearly 4/5ths.

2. Certain promotional efforts began to really pay off, doubling my visitors within three months and forcing me to switch to a very, very expensive web server package.

3. A devastating dual data loss on my home computer meant I lost most of the home-grown CMS I'd developed, as well as most of the data. While I still had the generated HTML pages, it would mean months of work to re-enter the data and re-build the CMS.

Well, looking at the facts, I didn't really have a lot of choice. So I went shopping with what I had left - a site with a very loyal visitor base, potential for much greater ad sales for someone more experienced than I, a large and thriving community, and thousands of pages of static content - to find a buyer.

Trouble is, I found a buyer who didn't know much about the web, although he assured me he'd be hiring someone who did to manage the site.

With a heavy heart, I signed a deal and the site was transferred over in early 2000.

The next four years was tough, watching the site disintegrate before my very eyes. Mismanagement. Broken templates and functionality. No content updates for over two years, when I'd been so careful to update every month with a huge amount of fresh content. Eventually the site was taken down altogether and the domain now redirects to the buyer's other, related site.

Finally, I managed to make my peace with it. Pampered Puppy helped a lot with that. Amusingly, as a side note, the owner contacted me a year or so ago and offered me the site to run again, assuming that I'd do it for free - I put up the work, he puts up the hosting cost. I smiled and told him that I had other fish to fry, these days.

Which brings us to the present.

Recently, when sharing past web projects, I decided to upload a version of Pathway I had on record from 1997. Funny thing: it's been spidered by Google. It now shows up in the top ten results for a whole slew of vampire-related searches. I know, because my bandwidth use is starting to increase from these new visitors.

Which leaves my dilemma: should I put a robots.txt up and stop the spidering? Or should I allow the few fragments that are left of Pathway to remain up and visible to interested searchers?

I'm pretty sure that I'm not in violation of the sales agreement with the owner, since I did put up the site just as an example of past work, and it's very out of date. No, it's not legality that worries me, really.

I guess it's just the fact that the site isn't what it was. It brings up some sad memories. And part of me thinks it should just die off. To robots.txt, or not?

I could really use some opinions on this. Maybe someone should contact the original buyer and offer to take it off his hands. Anyone feel like running a vampire site? :-)

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