gdanmitchell
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phil hawkins wrote:
That's what I didn't know, if it was a labor of love for the owners or a for-profit web site. Seems like such a waste, though, in any case. What used to be a great resource.
I can't speak for them, but as someone who has run websites for 20 years (!), I can attest to the fact that the task of updating older material could gradually become larger than the task of creating new material, leaving aside other things like having a life or keeping a job!
It is interesting that when someone wrote a paper book (remember those? -) back in the day, the book remained as it was for years — until and if there was a revised edition. Today, we expect things to be updated continuously and almost immediately. The reality is that this isn't always going to happen. Sometimes folks created the original material as a labor of love, but didn't necessarily agree to continue that volunteer work forever. In other cases they may have created it with the hope that it would produce a business return in the form of marketing value, and that may not have panned out over the long run. Sometimes their interests changed or they became too busy doing other things.
It is curious to me that in this new era of the web we sometimes expect (demand?) that resources shared without cost should also be updated by those who provide these resources to us for free. I can share (and have experienced) your disappointment when a wonderful free resource goes out of date, but perhaps we should be grateful that it was available and avoid the appearance of ingratitude when a person is no longer willing or able to give us updated versions of the thing for free! :-)
Take care,
Dan
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