I've heard that Geocities is shutting down today. The very first HTML I ever wrote was for my Geocities homepage and now it is gone.

It's been almost a year now since my first web startup, Pownce, a social blogging site, was also shut down. Turning off a website is full of emotional issues as well as technical ones and it certainly isn't something I prepared for when I started the site.

The active users of the Pownce were my biggest concern. Before we took Pownce offline, we made sure to let our users know what was happening. We also gave them the opportunity to export their content and possibly reconnect the community on other websites such as Vox and Ning.

However, the Pownce community will never be the same and that is a real tragedy.

I feel it is rude to assume, as site users, that we fully understand the decisions that the site owners made. Yes, it costs money and more importantly, it takes effort to maintain a website. Even if the site is no longer dynamic, someone still has to make sure the servers are running and the pages are loading.

What about permalink