Hi everyone, long time. This site has somehow become one of the oldest sites on the internet. I met Brian in 2004 and we launched the site on April 5, 2005.
Anyway, I've been wondering for a while about what to do with it. It was a WordPress site which is notoriously shitty for exploits and I don't trust that it will receive security updates forever. It was also running on an old-ass server using an OS from 2016, so without intervention it probably would have eventually been exploited again, or taken off the internet completely as the hosting company I was using would inevitably stop allowing old Ubuntu virtual machines to run in their environment. This site predated AWS, GCP, Azure, all the new-fangled Kubernetes microservice cloud shit and was just running in a tiny virtual machine with 1GB of memory and a small amount of compute for the last 10+ years.
Worried about all of this, I messaged Brian a couple years ago saying I needed to take the site down. He was disappointed and I lamented that there wasn't an easy conversion that I was aware of that would free me from the anxiety of being shackled to a platform as insecure as WordPress. He said some other stuff too and I forgot to respond, which sucks, but that's what ADHD does. I haven't heard from him since, but for anyone wondering, his real Facebook has recent updates, so he's alive and (presumably) enjoying life. Rather than take it down, which I couldn't really bear to do, I just left it running like the Opportunity rover, waiting for its time to die of natural causes or the relentless onslaught of malicious actors that infest the internet these days.
Cutting to the chase, in 2026, with the magic of AI code assistants, it has suddenly become very easy to do something about the WordPress problem. I've converted the site to plain static HTML. It now runs on a Raspberry Pi in my basement, with Cloudflare connecting it to the internet for basically free, and the source is backed up. I've set up a small build process as well, so updates are possible, albeit without the benefit of WordPress's CMS. This is both a blessing and a curse, but the site stays up, and likely can forever.
Regardless of how you feel about AI, it is what has enabled this to live on. It's been a long time since the site first launched. I've had a whole-ass career in this industry and love it or hate it, it is a useful tool and I'm glad I could use it to preserve the site. As for what happens next, I'm not really sure. It would be cool to preserve the site as-is, but archive.org kind of does that for us. Maybe Brian will want to post a few more comics, or has some already written, who knows (this isn't a teaser, I have no idea, don't get too excited).
The point is, the site is still here and it's still possible to make changes. We had 25k unique visitors last month, which is absurd to me when there haven't been any updates in 5 years. I hope you still enjoy reading this stuff as much as I have over the years, and here's to maybe one day getting the ending of Curious Urgency we've all been waiting for. Cheers, everyone, and thanks for reading.
This post was not written by AI