The Death of a Legend...

I spoke to the owner today and Thomas said that he hopes that the site is only down temporally, i have known him for many years of being on the KLF Mailing list. His site was legendary in the KLF community and it will be missed while it is down.

From His Site:

THIS IS A KLF ONLINE COMMUNICATION...

Whenever questioned about THE MANUAL, Bill Drummond replied that its essence was that, whenever you want to start something, you should not wait for someone to come along and tell you to do it. Just do it. I think this also applies to putting things to a rest.

From the days when I joined Daniel, Jens and Torsten to work on KLF ONLINE, our website has grown larger with every year, having seen various changes, added features and layouts. I say "our website" cause although I was not part of the initial list of members, after putting about five years of work into it, I adopted it as my child just like everyone of us.

The ever-growing list of added features, however, is one of the reasons I am writing these lines now. Both the code and the interal database structures have gone through so many incarnations that large parts of it are still patchworked into the (not anymore) current website, while other parts seem to never see the finish line.

Another reason is that content management currently is a pain. Most things happen directly in the database, making it impossible for others to add, update or delete parts when needed. I had added some things to change this, but they only add up to the clutter which the source code had become lately.

That is why, in my opinion, the whole website needs a fresh start. Tear it down and start rebuilding it from the grounds up. So much for the technical side of things.
On a more personal note - well, life moves on. There are many other things on my to-do list which just do not seem to happen due to the fact that, even after great time management, a day still has only 24 hours. And while being able to contribute to one of the few remaining KLF websites was a priviledge at first, it slowly has become a duty which seems to consume more and more time. Time which I would rather invest in different things nowadays.

There are some website projects waiting inside my mind to get out for... well, years. Things I know I would absolutely love to create and of which I hope will be interesting for others as well. But in order to get these things started, KLF ONLINE has to move down on my priority list.
This is no complete departure from this page, though. It just means that, as I wrote before, things have to be started from scratch again, not repeating the mistakes that have been made. A new version of KLF ONLINE will eventually grow and prosper again. Hey, someone has to do it, right? ;-)

This is not the end. There WILL BE further communications.
Cheers, Thomas

(c) 1999-2007 KLF ONLINE

What is your opinion?