May 14, 2002

12:43 AM

Erik Benson has put Ad Farm and Nervous Industries "up for adoption." As a user of Adfarm's text ads, I received an email and refund for ads not yet run: "Last week was one of the most difficult of my life. My brother-in-law passed away at the age of 20. It has woken me up to the realities of time passing, and I'd like to refocus my daily schedule to include things that are more in line with my long-term goals. Being offline is one of them. Being with my family and friends, and working on my novel, seem to be the most important things right now."
posted by dobbs (8 comments total)

I found Adfarm to be an excellent service for advertising my own site. My condolences regarding your brother-in-law, Erik. I hope you find what you're looking for with your refocus.
posted by dobbs at 12:50 AM on May 14, 2002

Wow, if I ever needed a reminder that priorities can change and change quickly....
posted by vbfg at 4:26 AM on May 14, 2002

Friends and family should be the first priority. I am glad Erik is stepping back, reassessing and pursuing that (time with friends and family and his novel) which are most important to him. More of us should realize that life is short and we get one chance at it - we should live it as we like and do as we may.

Kudos to Erik for making some tough choices and thank you for working hard to ensure the survival of both sites.
posted by gloege at 5:30 AM on May 14, 2002

s/are/is... feh...

I hate it when I make grammatical errors.
posted by gloege at 5:30 AM on May 14, 2002

ad farm was great ... i hope someone cool takes it over.
posted by clango at 7:11 AM on May 14, 2002

My condolences Erik, not sure what else to say other than I wish you all the best in the future.
posted by zeoslap at 10:27 AM on May 14, 2002

Thanks everyone. So far I've received dozens of applications for both sites, and I think they'll both probably benefit more from being out of my hands than they would if they had stayed. Tragedy aside (since it's not something that's easily talked about briefly), the idea of passing on website projects is really interesting to me. I've always been someone who enjoys creating websites more than maintaining them (same goes for projects at work), but there really aren't many examples of small projects developed by one person successfully switching hands. What I've found in the last week though is that there are others who love slowly growing a community over time and directing it, people (or in some cases teams of people) who have the resources to maintain large stable sites for long periods of time. So much of what we do on the web is private (or at least feels private), and I hope that this will encourage others to open up the arena a bit and allow collaboration between these two groups of people. Of course, it's not as clean cut as I'm making it out to be, and every case has its own differences...

One condition of the adoption of either site is that the code (as it exists at the handoff... not necessarily after the adopter has modified it) remain open source. The adopter will receive the domain and the scripts and the database dump, but I'm going to open up the entire code base for others to use if they're so inclined. Perhaps niche sites specializing in ads for certain types of clients will spring up, or maybe someone will find a new take on land mail art. Or maybe not. The point is that as much as I loved creating and developing these sites, I don't feel like I own them, and want others to use whatever they can of the work.
posted by mockerybird at 10:47 AM on May 14, 2002

*applause*
posted by fraying at 4:20 PM on May 22, 2002