The passing of a loved one is a traumatic experience, and where to post your obits can be a hard decision but it is actually a very important one.
Many of my readers will be familiar with Meg and her Blogpond , but many probably don’t realise she runs a website for online obituaries in Australia .
Keep Your Obits in Safe Hands
I just discovered that my father almost disappeared from the face of the internet. Whilst he had been online for 12 years before his death 2 years ago, for him his homepage was that of his computer club, and so when they posted an obituary after his passing, even I looked on it as the “official” obit site, and linked to it.
They gave the obit page an amazing amount of respect, and it featured prominently on the home page for almost 2 years in the primary navigation.
Sudden Changes In Websites
Accidental mistakes happen when you are in a rush…
Yesterday I found out that a legend among Commodore Computer Users , Jim Butterfield passed away over on Untwisted Vortex.
Today I went browsing to see if any of my fathers friends at the computer club had mentioned it, as Jim was a “friend of the Commodore family” so to speak, and had actually spoken at their computer club over in the UK a number of times.
It is actually quite likely I met Jim, though I don’t fully recall it – I recognise the photo, but that might be from one of 1000s of magazines I used to read.
As I expected, they have posted a short obituary about Jim and his time spent with the club in the UK.
After reading it I clicked through to the home page, and noticed that there was no longer a link to my father’s obit. Fair enough, he passed away almost 2 years ago. I then tried to find a link to his obit and couldn’t. Strange…
It turns out that in haste the obit to Jim was placed on the same URL as my fathers. I was lucky I found out about it now and grabbed a copy from the Google Cache.
Here is a link to Jim Butterfield’s official Obit which I found in Wikipedia.
I really hope some of Jim’s historical recollections don’t disappear off the internet, such as this piece about the history of Commodore .
The primary purpose of this post – I spent 10 minutes registering a domain for my father’s obit, checking the code from the Google cache, and uploading it, and it now needs to get indexed.
I am in a little bit of a rush as I will be doing some travelling, but I wanted to make sure I had this wrapped up. It is exactly how it appeared on the original site, and have dropped an email to the webmaster to ensure I have permission to use the words and pictures, and I have no idea of the source. I don’t expect there will be a problem, I have known him half my life.
Memories are important… respect them.
4 Comments
Andy
I’m glad that you were able to restore your father’s obit, and frankly touched that you remembered my Obits site. As you say, memories are so incredibly important.
All the best with your travels.
I would never have thought of memorializing a loved one on a website. It’s an interesting thing give them a permanent digital eulogy of sorts. Each day I learn more about the web and realize how little I actually know…
Cool that is really good way to show our love and respect to them.We are enjoying life only because of there hardwork.I liked your post and i will also try to do it from now.
Funny to see how life outside of the internet is slowly being incorporated in the web. Just by walking around your block and comparing “real-life services” with internet services, you can come up with a lot of new business plans that haven’t made their leap from reality to the internet yet.
-Edo