Will your log still be there in ten years?

It is a fair question to ask before you commit two years of photographs to anywhere, including here. So here is how build logs actually disappear, and how to check a site for yourself.

The three obvious ways

The forum closes, or loses its photos. This is the common one. Anybody who has gone looking for how somebody solved a problem has found the thread, found the answer written as "like this:", and found that the image host it pointed at died in 2016. The words survive and the pictures do not, which on a boat is most of the information.

The feed buries it. A build posted to a group is in reverse order, scattered across months, mixed in with everything else, and unreachable except by scrolling. It is technically still there. Nobody is ever going to read it in order.

The personal site lapses. Somebody builds a lovely site for their build, keeps it up for years, and then stops paying for the hosting. This one is nobody's fault and there is not much to be done about it.

The fourth way, which does not look like a problem

The site is still online. Your log is still on it. You can open it and every photo loads. And yet nobody finds it, because search engines cannot read the page.

This happens when a site draws its pages in the browser rather than sending them. The server sends a mostly empty page plus a program, and the program fills in your boat, your photographs and your notes once it is running. To you, looking at it, there is no difference at all. To anything that reads pages without running programs, and that includes a lot of what indexes the web and most of what feeds AI assistants, the page is blank.

So the log exists, and it is not findable. Which matters, because being findable is the entire point of writing one down for somebody else. The next person building your boat does not know your name. They search for the design.

How to check any site in about a minute

This works on any build log site. Please run it on this one.

1. Open somebody's build log on the site, on a computer.
2. Look at the tab. Does the title say the name of the boat, or does it say something generic like "build"? The title is the line that shows up in a search result.
3. View the page source (Ctrl+U, or Cmd+Option+U on a Mac) and search the source for the boat's name. If it is not in there, the page is being drawn afterwards and may not be readable by a search engine.
4. Look at the address. Is it the name of the boat, or a long number?
5. Ask for /sitemap.xml on the site. That file is how a site tells search engines what it has. Not every good site has one, but it is a fair signal that somebody thought about it.
6. Search for a log you know is there. Put a distinctive phrase from somebody's log into Google in quotes. If it does not come back, that is your answer.

What this site does about it

All of it is checkable with the list above, which is why the list is here.

• Pages are sent finished by the server. The words and the photographs are in the page itself, not assembled afterwards.
• Every build has its own title and its own address with the name of the boat in it. Once a log is published that address is frozen, even if the title changes later, so a link to it keeps working.
• There is a sitemap, and it lists every published log and every design page.
• Every log is filed under its design, so somebody searching for the boat rather than for you still arrives at it.
• You can take it with you. Export the whole log as a PDF, photographs included, at any time.
• Reading needs no account, so nothing is behind a sign-in wall that a search engine cannot get past.

None of that makes this site permanent. I am one person and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It makes the log portable and it makes it findable, which are the two things actually within anybody's control.

If you are choosing where to put a build, run the six checks. On here, on anywhere else you are considering. It takes a minute and it is your record.