Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Winding Things Down

Dear WriteMaps Users,

Thank you all so much for using this service over the past 4 years. WriteMaps has been an incredibly fun project to develop, and an invaluable learning process in what it takes to run a user-focused web application. Most of all, I've been both honored by your faith in WriteMaps for use in critical client project deliverables, and thrilled at the idea that it was at all useful in your work.

Unfortunately, it is with deep regret that I announce that today I'm beginning a phased closing of the service. While I'd really love to see WriteMaps live on for those who still enjoy it, I'm no longer able to personally maintain the service day-to-day, and I've been unable to find the right team to continue the project in my place. Perhaps I'll place the source code on Github for others to consume and rebuild, but its logic will need to be separated from a closed-source CMS first - it won't be a quick process.

The idea of closing a public website, particularly one that I made myself, is not something I take lightly. I'm a firm believer in the longevity of content on the web, and yet, the reality of the situation is that nothing on the web self-sustains: every site's content lives and dies by its maintainer's ability to pay hosting and domain fees, and in the case of a service like this, maintain the ever-increasing content that people trust will be there whenever they sign in.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the long-term role of apps on the web. When we speak of content longevity on the web, are we mostly referring to the documents, or the services as well? Are apps merely temporary services that we use to manage our daily lives, at best helping us generate the documents that we care about keeping for a longer term? I'm not sure I have an answer, but I do feel there's more long-term value in the content we produce than the app that we used to produce that content. I'm more tied to my vacation photos than the site that I use to host them (though I do love that site as well).

It was never very expensive to run this site. I never made money from the site, and I did pay for all of the hosting myself (save for a few small-but-much-appreciated donations. Thanks!), but the monetary costs were never prohibitive throughout the product's lifecycle. The primary burden of running WriteMaps was the stress of being responsible for other people's data. WriteMaps never experienced any significant data loss (thankfully!), but I was constantly concerned with whether my backup procedures were sufficient, and as I'd imagine any web service would, I did have to field several middle-of-the-night calls from distressed users with corrupt sitemaps (all recovered okay, to my knowledge). In the end, the real necessity of ongoing maintenance is the reason I need to close the site down: I won't be available to maintain the service responsibly moving forward, and simply letting it go unwatched would be a disservice to the people who use it.

A Pretty Good Run

For a small personal project, WriteMaps enjoyed some relatively great success. As I closed the registration form last night, I noticed there are currently 62,560 registered accounts in the database. WriteMaps was covered on some popular blogs and magazines, and received several accolades from colleagues I greatly respect. For me, it was also a great learning experiment: it was the first thick-client web application I'd ever designed and built.

Changing Times

WriteMaps was originally built with the intention to help streamline the planning stages of web design and development. At the time, planning website deliverables often included a static hierarchical representation of the site's pages and their relationships to one another, styled in an org-chart format. These types of sitemaps work well for simple page & directory hierarchies, but they aren't very good at describing dynamic application workflows as they tend to be quite binary in terms of relating pages to one another. On today's web of dynamic apps and partial page updates, the idea of a static hierarchical sitemap seems less and less relevant in a future client deliverable process.

That said, WriteMaps does have many active users, and I understand that many people still find it useful in their work. While registration is currently closed, the service itself is still open to those with existing accounts, and I have no set date in mind for when it will be completely turned off. It's likely that I'll disable editing before shutting the service off completely, still allowing people to export their content for a while without continuing to expand the database.

Existing Users: Please Export Your Content

In the interest of ensuring that the content generated by WriteMaps lives on, I've provided a few ways to export your data. As I have a feeling many of you will find a spreadsheet to be the easiest way to manage content generated in WriteMaps, I've spent the most time on the CSV export, which will download a file that should open in programs like Excel and Numbers. Other export options are available - HTML and XML sitemaps. These formats will display your content in a dialog that you'll need to copy and paste into another document to save.

To export a sitemap, simply open your sitemap and pull down the "File" menu in the WriteMaps interface. There you'll find the export options.

Until Next Time

I'll post again soon as the next phase of shut down approaches. At this time, I'm not sure if that phase will simply disable editing, or close out the service entirely. Either way, there will be sufficient warning.

Thanks

Again, thank you so much for using WriteMaps, and I'm very sorry for the inconvenience this change will likely cause. If you have any questions or comment, please write to me personally at scott [at] scottjehl.com.

Scott Jehl

Posted by Scott on 09/21 at 08:33 AM