Death X.0

In the era of instant blogging, microblogging and social networks we can share our ideas and thoughts of the day will millions at the click of a mouse, but what do we do for our private thoughts of the day? Before the internet, many people would have private diaries where they'd share their inner thoughts knowing nobody would ever read them. This is where you can be truly honest and write without being judged.

Many people would also leave instructions in their will for the contents of that private journal be be made available to family members when they die. We first need to look at a few distinctions.

• Public is where you put stuff for public consumption and to engage with people.
• Private is where you put your thoughts that will one day become available to the general public after you die.
• Personal is where you put stuff for your family and friends only which they'll see after you die.

Both the private and personal spaces allow you to confide details, doubts, ambitions, worries or anything else that you can't make public but want to either put down as a record of events, or as your side of something that you can't express at the time. It can be that you have nobody to confide in, and that setting down some thoughts that are chasing themselves around and around in your head can help release them and let you move on. It could be stuff that you need to say to people but can't while you're alive for fear of hurting them, or the fallout it will cause. Whatever the reasons, frequency and separation, this post is about the technical "how" you'd do it.

Any solution has to be private (not viewable easily while you're alive). It also has to stand the test of time; there's no point in having recorded a video message in say Flash, if in 20yrs time when you do die and it's made available, Adobe are out of business and the final version of the Flash player won't open that recording to play it. It has to be an easy solution for someone in your will to be able to make available to either your private or personal wishes. It also has to be easy to add new entries confidentially.

I have a few ideas on how this could be done, but this is a post about asking you how you'd do it. To see how many people have given this a thought.

Since I use Drupal, I've thought about a new content type set to either unpublished, or private, where I give instructions and login details to be used to publish en-masse, or remove the private setting. This suddenly adds a second blog to my site, with every entry timestamped so that anyone who cares to, can match those entries to their interactions with me to get a better insight into what was going on with me at the time, and maybe give some background to why I did or said what I did. This would involve an additional element to separate private from personal. It could also be done in other blogging platforms and CMS's in some way. I've thought about a separate subdomain with a different install of Drupal just for this.

The downside of this is that it is available if someone compromises your database. It's also relying on your software / server / host being working at the time too. Given that the whole point of this process is to leave both your loved ones and the people who read your blog etc online with some extra insight after you die, it needs to stand against the march of technological progress.

Rather than any programming solution (Apache, MySQL, PHP, Drupal) a better bet would be something which does flat text files but in some sort of protected way. Something like a DokuWiki install on a subdomain is an option. Even if it's not updated in 10yrs, and the php is not safe to run, the data is in flat text files on the server, so it can be rescued and made available in that form. Dokuwiki is of course a wiki, and a rather nice one at that. It does have a blogging plugin which is not suitable (for me anyway) as a regular public blog, but would be ideal for this. FlatPress is a flat text file approach to WordPress, which would likely be even better suited.

For additional security, you could have the subdomain with FlatPress or DokuWiki protected by an .htaccess file and a user / password which would be made public upon your death. Anyone who uses that would see your private blog. You could protect your personal stuff behind a user / pass for FlatPress itself, that would be given to your family and close personal friends after you die. As much as that works with flat files, it does still rely on the server and the host. How would you do it and cover that element too?

Lifeograph has a great little simple GUI, it's FOSS and has an option to encrypt your journals. It also allows you to create as many journals as you want, they're all simply files on your PC. You could easily have one private file and one personal journal file with different passwords. It'd be a good idea to store them outside of your regular working PC file structure too, because you don't know what preparations you'll be able to make to make that file available to those who you want to see it.

None of us know what the future brings. We can all say that when the time comes we'll make those changes, and we'll keep the software we use updated so it's functional when the time comes, but what happens if we're in an accident leaving us in a coma for years with memory loss etc? Can we even remember our email address, let alone the login / encryption details for our journals? There's every chance that the gap between our final entry and it being made available could be several years. For this reason simple must be best.

One solution could be a thumbdrive just for the purpose with a portable version of Lifeograph and only the two encrypted journals. A major drawback to Lifeograph as things stand is that it's Linux only, and even Ubuntu / Debian only, although who knows where it will be in years to come.

This conundrum is problematic no matter which way you look at it as it relies on outside factors, not just inside ones. As much as I advocate Linux and FOSS solutions, do I realistically think it will be the norm in 20yrs? Not really, but we can hope right? Being FOSS it can always be compiled to create an app that opens your journals, even if it's no longer maintained.

Any proprietary option wouldn't even be considered for this very reason. If the company goes under in say 5yrs, the code goes with it. If future versions of any OS won't run the old versions of the apps, then all the data (the journals) are unreadable blobs of useless data. The same caution must be applied to any hosted service like blogger.com for the same reasons; it may not exist when you need to make it public.

All of this is based on the idea that you're doing written journals. For many people the preferred way would be little audio or video clips of themselves from mobile phones or laptops. It introduces the idea of DRM into the mix.

You want to keep those videos or audio clips from being played before you die, yet make sure they can be played after then. Any DRM at all will fail at this point, as it relies on so many outside factors to all be available to click into place for it to play. Microsoft closed down the DRM authentication servers for music they'd sold, leaving everyone who'd bought those songs unable to play them.

It also introduces the spaghetti junction of alternate paths known as audio / video codecs and containers. What works fine now, may not in 10 or 20 years. Tried to play a .rm RealMedia file recently? If those need to be converted (rescued) into a current format, is the converter compatible? Some Microsoft Word 97 .doc files may not even open in Microsoft Word XP, let alone 20 years down the line in an alternate application.

Like everything else, none of us can see into the future. All we can do is try to foresee every potential hurdle and plan to avoid, sidestep or hurdle it. Those are the potential solutions I could think of with their pros and cons, I'm sure there are plenty more. Is this something we don't have an ideal solution to? If so is it something that could be turned into a solution? Or is it just impossible? So how would you do it?