Yesterday I retired Altering Time, my first website. It had a great run with some great people, and it’s sad it couldn’t last forever. In its memory I recorded the story of Altering Time, along with the stories of the games it was home to, Asylum and Faith. I also preserved the Halls of Fame for three of the many features the site had: Quotes, WTF Sites, and Karma. Finally, I spun off Just Ask Oldguy, a column on the site run by someone wiser than myself, into its own Q&A; site.
I never used to understand why people would have side projects each with their own domains and branding instead of tying everything into one monolithic site. Now I realize it’s much better for the same reason you modularize anything else: it lets you upgrade, rewrite, shut down, reassign, or otherwise evolve with minimal mess. Plus, it’s fun.
Having one less project on my mind, not to mention no longer having 20,000 lines of unmaintained PHP running on my server, will help me sleep at night. More importantly, it frees up that mental bandwidth for the next big thing. Onward!