Land of the Undead

One of the most disappointing things about the Web is the transient nature of some sites. You just start to get involved with a blog or other Web page, and suddenly the author determines that he or she has had enough of the work, and ceases to update the page. There are many good reasons why this happens, most of them due to the fact that these projects tend to be labors of love, rather than paying propositions. But it’s still sad to see something you appreciated die. Especially when the site seemed to be making a serious contribution.

Over the four years of The Rap Sheet’s existence, many other crime-fiction-oriented sites have come and gone. We’ve gladly installed links to them in this page’s right-hand blogroll, only to later remove them, due to their unexplained disappearance. But a number of interesting sites remain extant, though dormant. Our practice has been to move their links to the “About the Genre” section of our blogroll, and identify them as “archives” only. However, that really dilutes the purpose of the “About the Genre” section as a research and background source.

So beginning today, we have moved those dormant sites to a new blogroll department, titled simply “Archive Sites.”