All is deathly quiet on the World Wide Web's many ghost ships - those sites that have long outlived their usefulness but carry on stoically, ignored by all but the most obsessive fans with too much time on their hands.
Two and a half years after their historic 3-0 World Cup final victory, the France 98 site (www.france98.com/english/index.html) soldiers on with ancient news, antique ads, and atavistic animations.
Will Smith's dreadful Wild Wild West movie may have been shot at dawn, but its website, wildwildwest.warnerbros.com/, lives on. Unfortunately. Its rabid overuse of Shockwave technology was just as annoying as the movie. It's also slow like a nightmare day at work - please, do let this put you off visiting this walking dead website.
TrueFit.com, an amateur enthusiast site billing itself as "The Shoemaker's Home", (www.truefit.com) is a dead site haunted by its own guest-book area - which is still active, three years after any other page was updated. Comments such as "This is the worst site I've ever seen!" are common, but the simple, eloquent "If you are going to have a site then put something on it["] !" is advice that many sites would do well to heed.
One that cannot take this advice, because most of the people involved died in a mass suicide, is the Heaven's Gate site, www.zdnet.com/yil/higher/ heavensgate/index.html, which greets visitors with a spooky message from the other side: "As was promised, the keys to Heaven's Gate are here again." And again, in perpetuity.
Another one that survives its subject's suicide - this time single rather than mass - is that of Dr Frederick Lenz, AKA "Rama", www.fredericklenz.com. The redoubtable Dr Lenz, who took his own life two years ago, was not only a cult leader but also, according to the site, a world-class snowboarder, blackbelt in karate, best-selling author and the producer of 12 New Age rock albums. Ever modest, his Frequently Asked Questions section answers the relevant "Why are you still single?" with "I just haven't met that special someone yet", (as opposed to "I'm quite mad and about to top myself" one assumes).
As you might expect, enduring millennial fear provides rich pickings for dead sites. The Very Rev Alan Jones www.gracecathedral.org/enrichment/forum/ for-19991107.shtml provides the answers to the vexed questions of "Millennial Fear or Faith?", "Are you really prepared for the Y2K bug?" and "Will millennium madness become a self-fulfilling prophecy?" Recorded on November 11th, 1999, at the height of the psychosis, it's still there, in Real Audio. All 47 minutes and 15 seconds of it (not that I got all the way through mind, 23 seconds was enough to have me regret that the world survived Y2K).
If you have a web site which is about to die, you may want to visit a site, www.finalthoughts.com, that allows you to send e-mail wishes from beyond. Founder Todd Michael Kimm, a 31-year-old Los Angeles (of course) lawyer, came up with the idea for Final Thoughts while on a flight from LA to London. The plane hit heavy turbulence and, unlike the rest of us who seek solace in religion or whiskey at this point, Kimm saw a business opportunity and dollar signs.
For further information on some of the above, go to www.disobey.com/ghostsites
pcollins@irish-times.com
