The following letter is from rivguy:
This is a response to a four-year-old post (go here), and happily the Curbside Classic site is still alive and well. I discovered CC over six years ago. At first, I was a habitual reader, then later I contributed frequent comments. After a couple of years I decided that I would start my own blog to share my views and experiences (betterbeaters.blogspot.com).
The internet is a wonderful resource to launch your own website, with easy and free access. Of course you still have to put in the work, almost always unpaid, especially in the beginning. Personal blogs come and go, some develop and evolve over time, but most just fizzle out. Blogs are kind of old news now, social media such as Facebook, Instagram, etc. has replaced this type of media and it seems that the public has just moved on.
I agree that Curbside Classic has become a vast repository of popular automotive history and it would be a great loss to the enthusiast community if all of their information was to be lost. I will second your idea of developing downloadable e-book anthologies. The loss of informal web based information databases is a real worry. Even my humble website has accumulated over six years of blog posts. However humble they may be, they do represent a body of my work, and have value to me.
I have lately taken the effort to print out some of my more stylistic writing efforts. Unfortunately, we the public, have gotten used to receiving and having access to web based sites at no cost. As an auto enthusiast I at one time maintained subscriptions to four or five automotive magazines, for years.
This was at considerable cost, but now I’m too cheap to pay for individual internet sites. I think that having a subscription based system might help more elaborate websites to survive. I would like to thank Paul Niedermeyer and his staff for all their hard work over the years. I have enjoyed their efforts and hope they can continue into the future.
Indie Auto invites your comments (see below) or letters to the editor (go here).
It’s funny to traverse all these different automotive websites and see familiar names pop up again and again. Nice to run across you again, Rivguy.