I had a request to help contact a ‘missing’ blogger yesterday.
That got me thinking about that particular blogging issue once again.

What happens to our blogs, if something happens to us? Sudden illness, perhaps even unexpected death, and the blog stops posting. No replies to comments, no contact by email, and we just become ‘missing bloggers’. I have no contingency plan for this on my own blog. No post ready as an obituary, should I unexpectedly shuffle off this mortal coil. Nobody else has access to my WP password, and as far as I know, nobody would even think to tell the blogging community of my demise.

Even if all that was in place, would those left behind even remember how to put up that post, or bother to let my email contacts know? I doubt it.

That leaves us with the ‘how long’ scenario. How long do we wait until we presume that out blogging friend is either dead, or too ill to ever post again? Some bloggers post so rarely, it might not seem strange at first. But many of us post daily, or at least weekly, so that absence would soon be missed. Then after a few months, perhaps a year, we have to resign ourselves to believing they are gone for good. At least their blog will go on, and their posts remain stuck in the virtual cloud for as long as WordPress continues to operate.

Over the past seven years, I have been notified of three bloggers who have passed away. One of their relatives kindly contacted their email recipients, or managed to post an obituary. But many more have just disappeared. Their blogs are often stagnant, that last post resembling the uneaten meal on the Marie Celeste. In some cases, they have deleted their blogs completely, or made them ‘private’. But whatever the reason, they are gone, and have never reappeared.

In this blogging community enjoyed by so many of us, the disappearance of a blogging friend leaves behind a feeling of genuine bereavement.

So this post is for all you ‘absent’ bloggers. You are missed.