A couple of years ago I got wind of the fact that geocities was about to die and along with many others I did my bit to save geocities, the site now lives on (or as much as I could save of it) as reocities.com.
At the time I didn’t think too much of it, a small thing to do really. But over the years, after many thousands of emails from people that are insanely happy that their old webpages, photos of loved ones (sometimes deceased) and tons of other memorabilia have not been lost it became clear to me that this really was something that had to be done. It is incredible how that project has worked out in the long term, right now about 50,000 people daily visit reocities.com.
So, when I heard that posterous was shutting down I figured I’d try to do the same. The posterous guys have sold their company to twitter and twitter has decided to pull the plug. I made an offer to continue to host posterous.com and all the stuff on it but never received an answer.
Last week I decided I’d been waiting long enough, time to do something a bit more concrete. Jason Scott and the guys at archiveteam have done a great job at putting together an easy to use VM application that you can download and run, it is literally 3 clicks to join the archive team and to help them to save what they can of the posterous.com archives.
The clock is ticking, there are only 49 days left as of this writing, so any pages that are not saved in the next 49 days will be lost forever. Please come and help the archive team, if everybody that reads this blogpost downloads a few Gs worth of data then we may be able to reduce the size of the next hole in the web!