Diana MacDonald:
What does it look like to retire a web project? I don’t hear about project endings as much as project beginnings. Even then, among endings I mostly hear about failures. People tend to share stories of the aftermath of train wrecks more than quiet, satisfied conclusions. So I wanted to contribute my little story of retiring a silly pet project: Label Your Icons.
I get a mention in this post, which covers a bunch of considerations for winding down a website without breaking links on the internet. There’s also a bunch of tips for making maintenance of side projects easier.
Personally I try to archive a site and use redirects where possible. Most recently I did this with decentralised.social, where I replaced a Pleroma instance with static HTML.
I needed to minimise the amount of effort required to maintain the site. Static sites are a lot easier than dynamic sites to update over time. Buildless projects are a lot easier to keep running than projects that use complex build systems.
You really can’t beat a static HTML and CSS. We’re spoiled for choice with static site generators nowadays too. If you pick your static site compiler carefully it’s likely to be very low maintenance. My personal favourite is Zola, which is just a single binary—no runtime or dependencies to manage.