I wrote a blog post introducing Collageify some time ago but it got lost to the annals of time. Anyone who’s ever had one of those obscure side-projects that just sit somewhere out of sight and out of mind can probably relate. You create the thing. You forget about it. It disappears.
But honestly, that’s just not good enough. Just because you forgot about the thing doesn’t mean the people who were actually using it forgot about it, and as I forgot, people were using Collageify.
Just how many of these obscure projects end up facing the same fate? Hobbyist spaces are plagued with this issue. It’s not an issue of abandonware, it’s an issue of dissappearware, goneware. What was once available simply vanishes, often forever.
The problem is simple: Tools are created for small groups of people with a niche interest and then the creator forgets to pay for a hosting bill, or domain expires and the project’s only online presence quickly becomes an archived page on the Wayback Machine.
The problem also stems from the creators of these projects. Your average dev-type likes having their own dev-space, typically a VPS of some sort. They also like registering their own domain with a quirky gTLD where their portfolio site can sit. Eventually though, those Digital Ocean’s reminders of overdue payments lead to account suspension and whatever was sitting on that VPS hosting your neat .fun domain is no longer is accessible.
The solution to this quite simple, hosting externally on a space that’s most likely not going to go anywhere and actually releasing the source code of your application so that someone else can pick it up further down the line. For hosting, that can be as simple as GitHub pages if all you have is a front-end Javascript application of some sort. For the projects where the limitations of GitHub pages prove troublesome, perhaps a better solution would be Heroku, which allows hobbyists to deploy non-commercial personal projects free of charge with support for pretty much every language you’ll ever use.
Thankfully I did follow at least part of my own advice and publicly hosted the source code on GitHub, which I simply redeployed on my new instance. So for now Collageify is back, but admittedly I’ve not moved it anywhere.