The Fragility of Online Content
by ________
Posted on July 9th, 2012 at 2:41 pm
Must-read detective work by Edward Champion regarding the disappearance of an online literary magazine, “3:AM Magazine—How Twelve Years of Literary Content Disappeared in an Instant”:
3:AM Magazine, the first literary magazine to champion Tom McCarthy’s work and a pioneering avant vanguard that had published the early work of Tao Lin, Tony O’Neill, and Ben Myers, had vanished in an instant, with the hosting company seemingly disappearing along with it. While a substantial chunk of the magazine’s content was still available through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, there was no backup. And according to editor-in-chief Andrew Gallix, the site was held together by little more than “a doctored WordPress system.”
“It never occurred to me that our server could just be switched off without a word of warning…