Last Words

I wonder how many bloggers have thought about posting something after their death. There was a recent case of Andrew Olmsted, a soldier who arranged for just that. He left a touching post, so if you don't want to get all teared up now, you may want to put off clicking on that link. Here I'm going to talk about more mundane matters: how you'd arrange for such a post to occur.

Andrew did it by enlisting the help of a friend. Another blogger unknowingly left his last post about the person who would murder him minutes later. Many of us probably would like to say something, even if it's just "Sorry, I won't be posting any more".

So how would you do that? You could set up a trigger that would fire after you had NOT done something for some period of time. Some blogging platforms have methods to publish to a future date - you could publish for the end of next month and keep moving the date out farther every week. But that runs some risk: an extended power outage or even an extended illness could prevent you from resetting the countdown that will cause the post to be made.

If you know where your obituary is likely to be published and if it will be on-line, you could have a regular scan of the website(s) that will carry it and trigger your post upon seeing your name and address. That seems to be less likely to cause a false trigger.

There's more than your website, of course. What about the hundreds of emails from Net friends and possibly irate customers? Don't they deserve some explanation as to why you are ignoring them? And then there are all the social sites: a long lost friend finally finds your LinkedIn profile but sadly just a few days too later, and now thinks that you are rudely snubbing them.

Me? I'm not going to worry much about it. I've left passwords and such in my papers; if someone wants to post a notification of my death here, that's fine. But I'm not going to bother with a requiem post. I've thought about it, but really what is there to say? "There won't be any more posts, move on, nothing to see here" is about it, isn't it?

It would be ironic and mildly amusing if in fact this did turn out to be my very last post. I don't think that's very likely.. but we never know, do we?

And no I'm not looking into Geek Urns or Caskets. Just in case you were wondering..

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Wed Feb 20 17:03:12 2008: Subject: Nice try   Niall


You're not getting out of this weekend *that* easily. ;)



Wed Feb 20 18:03:05 2008: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Looking forward to it, I am..

How often do I get the opportunity to spend your money like water?



Tue May 5 10:53:27 2009: Subject:   TonyLawrence


Someone is offering a service to help some parts of this: http://chris.pirillo.com/how-to-save-your-digital-assets-when-you-die/

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