There’s such a wealth of information about RVing and long-term camping online. We are constantly researching.
To my fellow RVers, I encourage you to do what you can to keep your sites online, even after you lose interest in blogging, quit RVing, or switch to posting solely on YouTube or other “siloed” service. (A siloed service is one which can only be used or accessed through a specific app or other limiting factor, like Facebook, Twitter, and yes, even YouTube, where posts can vanish at the whims of the services’ owners.)
Many sites fade away. There are still some decades-old gems out there though.
One of my favorites is Two Penny Travels’s computer setup from 1999. As I write this post from a 4-pound laptop tethered to a smartphone hotspot (at speeds of 45mbps up and 23mbps down), I think about Sam and Alice (of Two Penny Travels) and the evolution of technology. I’m grateful their site is still online to educate RV newbies like us about where we’ve come from and, by extension, where we’re going.
But not all posts are outdated. So-called “evergreen” posts never age: we will always benefit from stories like these:
- The RV Nomads fulltime RVing with cats (2014)
- Wheeled and Free’s downsizing for RV living (2014)
- Roads Less Traveled’s very comprehensive post on how to be a fulltimer (2015)
- the travel logs of Home is Where We Park Our House
Of course, sometimes information becomes out of date as laws and technology changes, and as we evolve as people, but having background information for future decision-making is rarely a bad thing.
For example, plenty of RVers today still use the word “gypsy” in their usernames and taglines. Here is why we must evolve and stop using that slur right now.
If you think your site (or sites you find) might not last for the long-term, you might consider submitting it for archiving with the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (paste the URL for each page you’d like to archive into the “save page now” section, which is currently located at the bottom-left area of the page).
These older sites are also the ephemera of our collective RV culture. They are our stories and our journeys. They should be cherished and preserved.