The average life span of a website is 44 to 75 days. By this calculation, our homepage-blog is going through a midlife crisis. And now that vacation season is here and everyone is busy planning trips or hunting for part-time jobs, who knows how long this site will last...

Anyway, before it's too late, I thought I'd "save" it by submitting it to e하루616, an annual one-day web archiving event sponsored by Daum Communications, among others. I uploaded the first page of our homepage (to see it, you have to "download" and "open" in your browser when prompted) as well as a long auto-scroll screen capture image. (I don't know how long those links will work.)

Last year, Yahoo had a similar event, though on a much larger scale. For 30 days, they invited people from around the world to submit materials in digital form documenting life on Earth, calling it the "first-ever electronic anthropology project." (I think I uploaded a picture or two of my daughter.) The digital archive was sealed and sent to the Smithsonian to be opened in 2020.

On a more regular basis, The Internet Archive tirelessly crawls the web and tries to preserve every page by taking "snapshots." With their Wayback Machine, you can even see older versions of websites, even those that have long disappeared. Travel in time and see what the old English Department homepage looked like in 2000.