Twenty years!

Twenty years! Yes, it has been 20 years since my website Rarebird's Rock and Roll Rarity Reviews first went live on May 31, 1999. It was hard enough to believe when my site reached its ten-year mark. In my 10-year anniversary post in 2009, I said that I hoped to keep the site up and running for another ten years. Well, hooray for me! Mission accomplished.

Since their name resembles the Roman numeral XX, I will enlist the band called the xx to provide the background music for this post:



So, now that I have succeeded in my long-term goal of keeping my site online for two whole decades, the next question is: What now? I honestly don't know how much longer I will be keeping the site online, at least in its traditional form. As proud as I am of the site, it is getting more expensive to preserve its online presence. I recently renewed both the domain and the storage, so it will at least stay online until next Spring of 2020. But beyond that, the site's future is uncertain. Paying for its renewal is a decision I make each year around this time.

But I certainly have no regrets. As I noted in a more recent anniversary post, old-school personal websites like mine have been long out of fashion, since blogs (like the one you are reading now) and social media rendered them all but obsolete in the mid-to-late-'00's. That's why so many sites like mine have since disappeared from the web, or have not been updated for a decade or more. I can certainly understand the reason for this. I can remember one time period from 15 years ago, in the Summer of 2004, when I felt I was finished updating my website for good, and that no one seemed to be visiting the site anymore. Of course, those feelings of lost inspiration did not last long, especially when I started to publish this blog at the end of that year. But if I had continued to feel like my website's day was done, then it probably would have disappeared forever by now, and in no later year than 2010. I'm glad it didn't end that way.

One thing I've noticed: some now-defunct websites of old have been "mirrored" at other sites, so they still exist online even if the original site creators are no longer maintaining them. I am not counting on anyone mirroring my entire site if it does go offline, so I have been toying with the idea of re-printing my site's original pages as posts on this blog. So far I have only done so for the Beatles page, but I may continue later with other pages. This would keep the web pages I created in my younger years online for as long as the Blogger service shall last. And, of course, I will continue to add new posts to this blog as I see fit.

Wherever it goes from here, I am so happy to have been able to keep this site online for 20 whole years. I appreciate every visitor and every visit to the site. Thanks for all of your support!

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