Almost everything in our world goes bad eventually. The milk you bought a week ago will be bad in a while. The leftovers you brought from that Chinese place last Tuesday expired long before but you took them anyway. Hell, even your domains expire if you don't renew them.
Everything is changing, faster than ever before. Some countries even put expiration dates on their laws so that they don't keep around bad ideas for centuries. Smart idea. And yes, also copyrights expire.
Only our blog posts are meant to be there for eternity.
Yes? No, not quite. And yet there is no expiration date we could set in our blog softwares to get rid of them after a while (deactivate, maybe, not necessarily delete them). Think of all those old, useless blog posts, moldering in the attic of your blog, waiting to catch dust, comment spam, or both.
Admittedly, some of the things we write are quite useful for a long, long time. But, admit it, that's not true for a lot or our posts.
So how about a wordpress plugin (or whatever software you use) that does the following:
- gives you the choice to set an expiration date for every blog post you write (defaulting to does not expire, or maybe something sensible)
- deactivates said post after the specified period
- and maybe has some fancy more choices like letting you choose on your dashboard if you actually want it to expire (yes, deactivate or yes, delete) or if you want to reactivate it. For a new expiration period, or forever, finally, because this article turned out to be helpful for all generations to come.
Hm, so what do you think about my crazy Monday night plugin idea? Let me know.