7 ms·

Shutting Down My Site

81 points by patdryburgh 15y ago

patdryburgh 15y ago
Sorry, the title was censored.
- fooandbarify 15y ago
  That blog post really resonated with me. Thanks for writing it.
RexRollman 15y ago
Too bad. I liked the Simpledesks site.
rokhayakebe 15y ago
Well since it paid, why not sell it, or give it to someone who will run it. I check Freshome almost daily. You can say looking at other people's home is pointless specially expensive ones because most readers will never live in such a house. However some people may just find it joyful. Just check your logs and see the ten most frequent visitors, ask a couple of them to run it.
- patdryburgh 15y ago
  This was an option I considered and discussed with a friend who is well known in the minimalism/productivity space. To me, it's actually more of a moral issue: is keeping a site like Simple Desks online good, bad, or neutral to the world. I'm sure it's different for different people, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that in the end it was detrimental to people's time. We have better things to do with our time, and much more beautiful works of art to get enjoyment from.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    Since when are a bunch of pictures of desks a moral issue?
  - arn 15y ago
    Of course you are welcome to do whatever you want. I find taking it to the moral extreme strange though. That leaves you little in the way of daily activities besides pure charitable work. Does your short film make the world a better place? I doubt it. It sounds like it comes down to what you enjoy, and that's great. The best motivation. Simple Desks though seems like the kind of site that some might get great joy out of.
    - patdryburgh 15y ago
      Hey Arnold, Tried replying to you through email, but the email bounced back. Used the email on your Hacker News profile. Cheers, Pat
      - arn 15y ago
        odd. might have hit up against a spam filter. I added an alternate email to my profile if you want to try again.
  - rokhayakebe 15y ago
    "Is it a waste of time if an artist spends a lifetime only thinking, then in the end write one poem that turns out to inspire thousands of people." If people are coming to the site, then it has value. What is detrimental is what causes harm. What puts a smile on someone face, even if it is a simple desk, is probably more therapeutic than Prosac.
  - jasonlotito 15y ago
    > We have better things to do with our time, That's a fallacy of consumption. The assumption that consuming media, whether it be art, movies, books, or anything that isn't the direct act of creating, is inherently wasteful. > and much more beautiful works of art to get enjoyment from. Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. The words and hours spent on the Mona Lisa are wasteful when you consider what it could have been spent on. Practical things. Alone, consumption is as wasteful as creation. Creating something no one uses or views... does a tree alone in the woods make a sound. In a very real sense, one cannot create without consuming. Do not belittle consumption, for it is the beginning of creation.
erikb 15y ago
Well, I have no idea who you are and what pages you are shutting down. Of course I wish you the best for your future. That being said: "The real question is, who gives a fuck?"
- raganwald 15y ago
  I belong to a Facebook group for mountain biking in Ontario. People will propose rides on there, and of course the other folks who want to join in will use the comments to indicate that they’re coming, discuss the timing, carpool, and so on. And then there are always a few folks who chime in with “Sorry, can’t make it” and “Sorry, not interested.” What we’ve discovered is that such messages do absolutely nothing to help the group with anything. Unless someone has already said they are interested, we discourage saying you’re not interested. It simply adds noise to an otherwise productive discussion. That’s my anecdote in response to what appears to be a declaration that you are not interested in this post.
  - jaredsohn 15y ago
    Going a bit off-topic, this happens on Facebook because when you decline an event it shows a text box asking to "say why you can't go". If Facebook would remove that textbox from the dialog, this would likely happen much less frequently.
- pg 15y ago
  If that's what you think, just don't comment.
hpaavola 15y ago
It always makes me a bit sad when any site is taken offline. I haven't even heard of Simple Desks before, but it still makes me sad that it is gone. Destroying bits is so darn easy, that people do it too much. I don't delete emails (my spamfilter might delete, I don't). Once in a while it's nice to see what you were up to 5 years ago. My personal homepage is still running. I haven't updated it in many many years, but it still there. Occasionally my friends and I check some photos from there that I posted almost 10 years ago. And I regret that I have deleted all previous version of my homepage. And it was a sad day when GeoCities was taken offline. Sure, if keeping your site up and running (even in read-only) costs too much, it's ok to shut it down. But please, try to save as much of the current Internet as you can so our children can see its history.
- patdryburgh 15y ago
  >It always makes me a bit sad when any site is taken offline. I haven't even heard of Simple Desks before, but it still makes me sad that it is gone. I'm very, very sympathetic to this issue, and agree that it hurts when any site goes down. However, Simple Desks was mostly a curated gallery of what already exists on the internet. A quick Google search for "Simple Desks" will turn up basically the same thing. The other question to ask is whether permanence is a value worth holding for all things. Is it really worth holding onto all of that email? (This is a personal question, for everyone to answer, not for one person to dictate over others.) My friend wrote a great piece on this recently (http://patrickrhone.com/2011/12/20/permanently-impermanent http://patrickrhone.com/2011/12/20/permanently-impermanent). It reflects on the freedom of not worrying about losing everything. He doesn't advocate being complacent, but simply acknowledging that no system is 100% sure to maintain our bits.
  - rhizome 15y ago
    The other question to ask is whether permanence is a value worth holding for all things. Is it really worth holding onto all of that email? (This is a personal question, for everyone to answer, not for one person to dictate over others.) In the present case, hasn't this in fact been dictated?
- 15y ago
generators 15y ago
Exactly my thought, Who gives a fuck ?
cjfont 15y ago
I'm glad you found something more fulfilling to do with your time, but that doesn't mean the Simple Desks idea was trivial, or on par with a porn site. I'm certain that many people can appreciate the ideal workspace setups of others, and yet it's not like something we would be fapping to. Honestly, I'm sad I didn't get a chance to really see the site before it got taken down.
elliottcarlson 15y ago
So you shut down a tumblr hosted site that didn't cost you anything to run except for time - and now all of us who had never heard of it before can't even see the content that used to exist. I'm glad you are doing something better with your time that you will find more fulfilling - but I think it's a shame you went this route.
- swah 15y ago
  Here is what you missed: __ | | No, seriously... I enjoyed looking at those photos once, it was just like an architecture magazine. No big deal to shut it off, just don't consider it your life's work.
  - keithpeter 15y ago
    wayback machine has some samples from 2010. As swah says a bit like Blueprint magazine circa 1985. I liked the older desks that had some marks on them, had been worked on. Does anyone not use a Mac?
    - dextorious 15y ago
      """Does anyone not use a Mac?""" There's this guy in New Zealand.
rys 15y ago
You shut it down because nobody should give a fuck about it, yet you tell us what computer you used to develop your website? I don't get it! Also, don't you feel a bit selfish for removing something that other people obvious find value in from the Internet?
- cgag 15y ago
  Yeah this just feels like selfish ego-stroking bullshit.
molecule 15y ago
apparent update: "Back, and better than ever January 20th, 2012. Many thanks to Pat Dryburgh for his excellent work over the years. Unfortunately, he has chosen to end this venture. We think that is a great shame, and we've decided to bring it back, but in a different form. When we relaunch on January 20th, Simple Desks will return with a more substantial aim: to provide food for thought on the subjects of productivity, minimalism and design and technology (along with some occasionally unrelated musings). We hope you'll join us. In the mean time, we suggest you read Pat's excellent blog post (patdryburgh.com) on his decision. We hope to avoid some of the issues he raises with the new incarnation of Simple Desks." http://simpledesks.tumblr.com/ http://simpledesks.tumblr.com/
- citricsquid 15y ago
  and it will suck. The idea of forcing change to revive something dead sucks, organic change (or evolution as one might call) it is great but taking a tried and tested idea that had popularity and changing it forcefully never works. Why don't they stick with what it was? :|
  - rhizome 15y ago
    Or just leave it in place and simply not update it.
  - gburt 15y ago
    If we're taking the organic model, what it was died. It clearly wasn't profitable/rewarding enough for the old owner, perhaps if you don't change it that will be true for the new owner.
ceol 15y ago
Link to the original site: http://simpledesks.tumblr.com/ http://simpledesks.tumblr.com/ It looks like someone has taken over. I'm glad, because it's a shame to shut something down that people enjoy, but you shouldn't feel forced to work on a side project. I wish you luck, and here's to hoping your future endeavors bring a bit more satisfaction.
JacobIrwin 15y ago
You can still see all the work via google images: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=simple+desks+on+tumblr&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=16979l20448l1l20522l13l9l2l2l2l0l182l985l2.6l11l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&biw=1520&bih=683&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=_7YAT-e2JMqQiAL1h4WkDg https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=simpl...
notJim 15y ago
I can relate to this so well. I've mentioned previously on this site that frankly I find much of the beauty and inspiration you can find on the web completely empty and meaningless. Technologists love to talk about the social impact the web is having and how it's going to change the world for the better (things which are undoubtedly true), but so much of it is so superficial that I can't help but think about what we're losing at the same time.
dan1234 15y ago
Oh well, I guess there's always http://www.deskography.org/ http://www.deskography.org/ for everyone else's desk-porn fix.
jyap 15y ago
What Do you mean here? "I kept it up because, baby, it paid." You just put Google Adsense ads on the Tumblr page?
- patdryburgh 15y ago
  No, the site was a member of Fusion Ads starting in January 2011. Before that, a company that made hardware for managing desk clutter sponsored the blog.
__david__ 15y ago
So I appreciate that it's your site and you have the right to do whatever you want with it, but isn't it a tad arrogant to judge what other people may or may not get out of it? To call it "porno" is to make a big assumption of what people are using your site for. And even if most people are just gawking at pretty pictures, isn't it a bit much for only you to decide whether it's a net positive or negative on the world? It reminds me of the whole "_why" thing. It's totally your right to stop hosting content, but it's also a bit rude.
hnwh 15y ago
why does this post exist?
sktrdie 15y ago
How much did it pay? If I may ask.

81 points by patdryburgh 15y ago

patdryburgh 15y ago

Sorry, the title was censored.

fooandbarify 15y ago
That blog post really resonated with me. Thanks for writing it.

RexRollman 15y ago

Too bad. I liked the Simpledesks site.

rokhayakebe 15y ago

Well since it paid, why not sell it, or give it to someone who will run it. I check Freshome almost daily. You can say looking at other people's home is pointless specially expensive ones because most readers will never live in such a house. However some people may just find it joyful. Just check your logs and see the ten most frequent visitors, ask a couple of them to run it.

patdryburgh 15y ago
This was an option I considered and discussed with a friend who is well known in the minimalism/productivity space. To me, it's actually more of a moral issue: is keeping a site like Simple Desks online good, bad, or neutral to the world. I'm sure it's different for different people, but I just couldn't shake the feeling that in the end it was detrimental to people's time. We have better things to do with our time, and much more beautiful works of art to get enjoyment from.
- rhizome 15y ago
  Since when are a bunch of pictures of desks a moral issue?
- arn 15y ago
  Of course you are welcome to do whatever you want. I find taking it to the moral extreme strange though. That leaves you little in the way of daily activities besides pure charitable work. Does your short film make the world a better place? I doubt it. It sounds like it comes down to what you enjoy, and that's great. The best motivation. Simple Desks though seems like the kind of site that some might get great joy out of.
  - patdryburgh 15y ago
    Hey Arnold, Tried replying to you through email, but the email bounced back. Used the email on your Hacker News profile. Cheers, Pat
    - arn 15y ago
      odd. might have hit up against a spam filter. I added an alternate email to my profile if you want to try again.
- rokhayakebe 15y ago
  "Is it a waste of time if an artist spends a lifetime only thinking, then in the end write one poem that turns out to inspire thousands of people." If people are coming to the site, then it has value. What is detrimental is what causes harm. What puts a smile on someone face, even if it is a simple desk, is probably more therapeutic than Prosac.
- jasonlotito 15y ago
  > We have better things to do with our time, That's a fallacy of consumption. The assumption that consuming media, whether it be art, movies, books, or anything that isn't the direct act of creating, is inherently wasteful. > and much more beautiful works of art to get enjoyment from. Beauty, as they say, is in the eye of the beholder. The words and hours spent on the Mona Lisa are wasteful when you consider what it could have been spent on. Practical things. Alone, consumption is as wasteful as creation. Creating something no one uses or views... does a tree alone in the woods make a sound. In a very real sense, one cannot create without consuming. Do not belittle consumption, for it is the beginning of creation.

erikb 15y ago

Well, I have no idea who you are and what pages you are shutting down. Of course I wish you the best for your future. That being said: "The real question is, who gives a fuck?"

raganwald 15y ago
I belong to a Facebook group for mountain biking in Ontario. People will propose rides on there, and of course the other folks who want to join in will use the comments to indicate that they’re coming, discuss the timing, carpool, and so on. And then there are always a few folks who chime in with “Sorry, can’t make it” and “Sorry, not interested.” What we’ve discovered is that such messages do absolutely nothing to help the group with anything. Unless someone has already said they are interested, we discourage saying you’re not interested. It simply adds noise to an otherwise productive discussion. That’s my anecdote in response to what appears to be a declaration that you are not interested in this post.
- jaredsohn 15y ago
  Going a bit off-topic, this happens on Facebook because when you decline an event it shows a text box asking to "say why you can't go". If Facebook would remove that textbox from the dialog, this would likely happen much less frequently.
pg 15y ago
If that's what you think, just don't comment.

hpaavola 15y ago

It always makes me a bit sad when any site is taken offline. I haven't even heard of Simple Desks before, but it still makes me sad that it is gone. Destroying bits is so darn easy, that people do it too much. I don't delete emails (my spamfilter might delete, I don't). Once in a while it's nice to see what you were up to 5 years ago. My personal homepage is still running. I haven't updated it in many many years, but it still there. Occasionally my friends and I check some photos from there that I posted almost 10 years ago. And I regret that I have deleted all previous version of my homepage. And it was a sad day when GeoCities was taken offline. Sure, if keeping your site up and running (even in read-only) costs too much, it's ok to shut it down. But please, try to save as much of the current Internet as you can so our children can see its history.

patdryburgh 15y ago
>It always makes me a bit sad when any site is taken offline. I haven't even heard of Simple Desks before, but it still makes me sad that it is gone. I'm very, very sympathetic to this issue, and agree that it hurts when any site goes down. However, Simple Desks was mostly a curated gallery of what already exists on the internet. A quick Google search for "Simple Desks" will turn up basically the same thing. The other question to ask is whether permanence is a value worth holding for all things. Is it really worth holding onto all of that email? (This is a personal question, for everyone to answer, not for one person to dictate over others.) My friend wrote a great piece on this recently (http://patrickrhone.com/2011/12/20/permanently-impermanent http://patrickrhone.com/2011/12/20/permanently-impermanent). It reflects on the freedom of not worrying about losing everything. He doesn't advocate being complacent, but simply acknowledging that no system is 100% sure to maintain our bits.
- rhizome 15y ago
  The other question to ask is whether permanence is a value worth holding for all things. Is it really worth holding onto all of that email? (This is a personal question, for everyone to answer, not for one person to dictate over others.) In the present case, hasn't this in fact been dictated?
15y ago

generators 15y ago

Exactly my thought, Who gives a fuck ?

cjfont 15y ago

I'm glad you found something more fulfilling to do with your time, but that doesn't mean the Simple Desks idea was trivial, or on par with a porn site. I'm certain that many people can appreciate the ideal workspace setups of others, and yet it's not like something we would be fapping to. Honestly, I'm sad I didn't get a chance to really see the site before it got taken down.

elliottcarlson 15y ago

So you shut down a tumblr hosted site that didn't cost you anything to run except for time - and now all of us who had never heard of it before can't even see the content that used to exist. I'm glad you are doing something better with your time that you will find more fulfilling - but I think it's a shame you went this route.

swah 15y ago
Here is what you missed: __ | | No, seriously... I enjoyed looking at those photos once, it was just like an architecture magazine. No big deal to shut it off, just don't consider it your life's work.
- keithpeter 15y ago
  wayback machine has some samples from 2010. As swah says a bit like Blueprint magazine circa 1985. I liked the older desks that had some marks on them, had been worked on. Does anyone not use a Mac?
  - dextorious 15y ago
    """Does anyone not use a Mac?""" There's this guy in New Zealand.

rys 15y ago

You shut it down because nobody should give a fuck about it, yet you tell us what computer you used to develop your website? I don't get it! Also, don't you feel a bit selfish for removing something that other people obvious find value in from the Internet?

cgag 15y ago
Yeah this just feels like selfish ego-stroking bullshit.

molecule 15y ago

apparent update: "Back, and better than ever January 20th, 2012. Many thanks to Pat Dryburgh for his excellent work over the years. Unfortunately, he has chosen to end this venture. We think that is a great shame, and we've decided to bring it back, but in a different form. When we relaunch on January 20th, Simple Desks will return with a more substantial aim: to provide food for thought on the subjects of productivity, minimalism and design and technology (along with some occasionally unrelated musings). We hope you'll join us. In the mean time, we suggest you read Pat's excellent blog post (patdryburgh.com) on his decision. We hope to avoid some of the issues he raises with the new incarnation of Simple Desks." http://simpledesks.tumblr.com/ http://simpledesks.tumblr.com/

citricsquid 15y ago
and it will suck. The idea of forcing change to revive something dead sucks, organic change (or evolution as one might call) it is great but taking a tried and tested idea that had popularity and changing it forcefully never works. Why don't they stick with what it was? :|
- rhizome 15y ago
  Or just leave it in place and simply not update it.
- gburt 15y ago
  If we're taking the organic model, what it was died. It clearly wasn't profitable/rewarding enough for the old owner, perhaps if you don't change it that will be true for the new owner.

ceol 15y ago

Link to the original site: http://simpledesks.tumblr.com/ http://simpledesks.tumblr.com/ It looks like someone has taken over. I'm glad, because it's a shame to shut something down that people enjoy, but you shouldn't feel forced to work on a side project. I wish you luck, and here's to hoping your future endeavors bring a bit more satisfaction.

JacobIrwin 15y ago

You can still see all the work via google images: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=simple+desks+on+tumblr&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=16979l20448l1l20522l13l9l2l2l2l0l182l985l2.6l11l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&biw=1520&bih=683&um=1&ie=UTF-8&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&ei=_7YAT-e2JMqQiAL1h4WkDg https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=simpl...

notJim 15y ago

I can relate to this so well. I've mentioned previously on this site that frankly I find much of the beauty and inspiration you can find on the web completely empty and meaningless. Technologists love to talk about the social impact the web is having and how it's going to change the world for the better (things which are undoubtedly true), but so much of it is so superficial that I can't help but think about what we're losing at the same time.

dan1234 15y ago

Oh well, I guess there's always http://www.deskography.org/ http://www.deskography.org/ for everyone else's desk-porn fix.

jyap 15y ago

What Do you mean here? "I kept it up because, baby, it paid." You just put Google Adsense ads on the Tumblr page?

patdryburgh 15y ago
No, the site was a member of Fusion Ads starting in January 2011. Before that, a company that made hardware for managing desk clutter sponsored the blog.

__david__ 15y ago

So I appreciate that it's your site and you have the right to do whatever you want with it, but isn't it a tad arrogant to judge what other people may or may not get out of it? To call it "porno" is to make a big assumption of what people are using your site for. And even if most people are just gawking at pretty pictures, isn't it a bit much for only you to decide whether it's a net positive or negative on the world? It reminds me of the whole "_why" thing. It's totally your right to stop hosting content, but it's also a bit rude.

hnwh 15y ago

why does this post exist?

sktrdie 15y ago

How much did it pay? If I may ask.