I stumbled recently upon Elizabeth Tai's POSSE and PESOS definitions:

• POSSE: Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere
• PESOS: Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to Own Site

Which prompted me to think that after a first POSSE phase, touying with the emerging web landcape, I was doing mostly PESOS as found that posting in topic-specific forums made reacghing an audience much easier. But after some time, after seeing forums disappear suddenly, I began to POSSE-collect my scattered PESOS posts.

But now at 66, I am more and more focused on PDP: Publish, Don't Perish!

Why?🔗

POSSE and PESOS answer the question where you publish. They say nothing about the one that worries me most at my age: will what you published still be there when you are not?

The whole "own your content" movement assumes you will be around to keep owning it — to renew the domain, to pay the host, to answer the support tickets. But at 66, I am starting to think more about the opposite assumption: what happens to all this when I cannot maintain it anymore?

What?🔗

I started applying PDP years before I gave it a name. In one year retired I wrote:

It may sound ridiculous, but at now 61, setting things up so they do not disappear when I do is becoming an important consideration. I will thus progressively stop using self-hosted sites to publish on places that will survive me, as nobody in my family is tech-savvy enough to maintain a web site.

That was the switch from mercurial to git, and moving to GitHub. As we say in France, "the graveyards are full of indispensable men."

So, as a pun on the famous saying Publish or Perish I decided to call it PDP: Publish, Don't Perish!.

How?🔗

Over the years I have refined this into a simple triage: separate my content by how much I need it to survive me.

• Transient — thoughts, rants, day-to-day musings. Keep them on this own self-hosted site. If it dies, no great loss.
• For the family — photos, memories, things your children will want. Put them somewhere that outlives you and easy to use for non-technical wife and chidren, even if it costs a bit: this is where paying a reliable host is worth it. I use a Hetzner Box.
• Perennial — code, hard-won knowledge, things the world might still want in 50 years. This goes into git repositories that I can thus move easily to git platorms that are the most probable to survive me, GitHub for now. I don't use facny GitHub features, to make moving or copying these repository as simple as possible.

And there is now a new, unexpected ally in the perennial column: AI. Even if I never get a single visitor on my pages on this site, I know that publishing on a perennial platform means my code will be ingested by AI assistants and become a tiny — very tiny — part of humanity's collective knowledge. I have no illusion that my contribution is a major one, but there is something quietly satisfying in the thought that my bash snippets will be digested forever by some distant neural network. The graveyards may be full of indispensable men, but their code lives on in the training data.

Am I reinventing the wheel?🔗

I did a bit of homework, and the honest answer is: no, the idea is not new. There is a whole movement around it, I just did not know the name.

The IndieWeb community has called it the Long Web for years, a concept Jeremy Keith articulated in 2008: the qualities that make a format good for the long term — simplicity, openness, standardisation — are the same qualities that make it good practice today. Brennan Brown's recent essay is the best modern treatment: the stats are sobering (a quarter of the web's pages from a decade ago are gone, two-thirds of links rot), and the conclusion is that the IndieWeb is accidentally a preservation ethic.

There is also Jeff Huang's "This Page is Designed to Last", a practical manifesto for building sites that survive 10 to 30 years — vanilla HTML, no hotlinking, static over dynamic. Much of what I did with this very site (plain Markdown files, no database, an SSG that outputs static pages) aligns with it, and the migration to Zola in 2026 was done with exactly these concerns in mind.

And if you want someone else to do it for you, the market exists: Posthaven promised to never shut down, and WordPress.com now sells a 100-Year Plan — $38,000 to keep your site online for a century. I wish them well, but it does raise the obvious question: what happens to the plan if Automattic itself does not make it to 2125?

So where does that leave PDP? I see it as the lazy man's version of all this. The Long Web is a movement, Jeff Huang's page is a manifesto, the 100-Year Plan is a product. PDP is just a reminder, for people like me who do not want to pay $38,000 or join a movement: choose your formats and your hosts with an eye on outliving you, and the rest takes care of itself. The good news is that the "correct" choice is also the simple one: plain files, open formats, and a host bigger than you are.

POSSE and PESOS assume you will be there to keep your site alive. PDP is for those of us who know we will not. :-)

Related thoughts: my single-binary fanaticism is the same reflex applied to code; the 2026 Zola migration and moving to GitHub were PDP before I had the name.