Separating the Fit from the Fallow

It’s damnably hard to keep a blog active--just ask anyone who has tried. So I tend to cut my fellow bloggers lots of slack when it comes to updating their sites. Some people, after all, only post irregularly and may allow their blogs to remain dark for months at a stretch.

But yesterday, while I was waiting around for the carpets in my home to be shampooed (something I probably don’t schedule frequently enough), I decided to do some thorough cleaning of my own here at The Rap Sheet. I went through the lengthy list of Web links in this page’s right-hand column, checking for broken connections or site name changes. In the course of that, I found a handful of blogs that appear, sadly, to have disappeared (Mister 8, Murder, Mystery & Mayhem, and Shred of Evidence), plus a larger variety that have gone unattended long enough for me to think them abandoned.

Here are the blogs that seem to have been left derelict:

• The Abbott Gran Old Tyme Medicine Show!

• Big Beat from Badsville

• Booknoir

• A Case of Murder

• Chalk Outlines in Snow

• Classic Paperback Reads

• Independent Crime

• My Year in Crime

• Petrona*

• Squeezegut Alley

• The Trap of Solid Gold

• Vintage Hard-boiled Reads

• Wisdom Mistaken for Lunacy

Rather than delete these altogether from The Rap Sheet’s links collection, I have relocated them to the blog’s separate page of Archive Sites. They will stay there, unless/until I discover that their authors have started updating the pages once more.

There was also a smaller quantity of sites I know aren’t traditionally very active, but that even by that forgiving standard have looked pretty darn uncared-for longer than I would expect. I’ll keep watch on these over the next few months, and if they finally appear dead, I shall move them to the Archive Sites page or delete them:

• Books ’n’ Bytes

• The Cozy Library

• Darkest Before the Dawn

• Fictional Musings

• I Am a Tie-in Writer

• Main Title Heaven

• My Place for Mystery

• Mysterical-E

• Writ

Should you, dear reader, happen to be the manager of any of the blogs mentioned above, I hope you’ll let me know whether you intend to reinvigorate your site; if so, I shall move it back onto The Rap Sheet’s active list. Drop me a line in the Comments section of this post, or else send me an e-mail note here.

* The inactivity here is understandable: blogger Maxine Clarke died last December.