This website is designed to be long lasting.

I'm disgusted that the average age of most internet pages is one year. Think of the Alexandria library slowly burning one wing at a time, and each new wing reconstructed just burns one year again anyway. It's lunacy, I tell you!

That's the kind of loss of information that is occurring. I've been using the internet long enough to notice that many of the cool things I've seen on the internet have disappeared over the years!

For proof, go to Memepool.com, (which is the internet's definitive treasure trove of all that which is interesting) and try visiting links for older stuff. Most of it is gone! Yes, there's the "Google cache", and the Wayback Machine, but what assurrance is there that these companies/entities will always be around, and accessible, in these turbulent economic times?

The internet may make anyone into a publisher, but if your words don't hang around very long, then your power to publish is merely borrowed, typically for about a year. What I'm aiming for is, oh, say one hundred years.

How will this "long lasting"-ness happen?

Here is my plan. Essentially, I'll be fussy about the technologies I use to host this site. Reliance on outside companies has been mimimized. Companies provide my internet access, hardware, and domain name registration and that's it.

Have you ever stopped to think about the people/institutions/companies you rely on when you use the internet? What are their goals? Do you agree with these goals? Are any potential problems or hassles inherent to these reliances cause for concern?

As long as I can get internet access (with the freedom to host my own web server), Linux-compatible hardware, and Domain registration, I'm good to go.

Data will be stored and distributed by open source technologies, so I don't get thwarted by companies who want to highjack my data, money, time and good intentions. This applies to all the underlying technological layers, such as Operating Systems (Debian GNU/Linux), Web Server (Apache), Content Management System (Plone, Zope, Python), and DNS (bind). In my opinion, these technologies will last "forever", always be free, and cause me no undue hassles (especially legal, political, and financial ones).