Saturday, March 21, 2015

Thescelosaurus: 1999–2015

After about 15 and a half years, I'm no longer going to be maintaining Thescelosaurus.com, expiration date April 9, 2015. It was just one of those things, with a number of reasons behind it. The main one is that I didn't know why I was doing it any more. I'd long ago stopped doing it out of enjoyment and had been doing it out of a sense of obligation. The field of dinosaur paleontology had passed me by years ago, beginning after my graduation from the University of Colorado at Boulder, so I was doing it for enjoyment, and if I wasn't enjoying it, what was the point? The quality of the content was never that hot (I'm not going to claim it was great at the beginning and then declined, because a lot of the initial stuff was pretty hare-brained). As the years went on, the seams resulting from cobbling on this and that were showing, the actual "physical plant" (or whatever the equivalent is for a website) was beyond archaic, and I didn't have the time or, in the end, the desire to bring it up to code. Finally, every year it got a little more expensive, and given the small readership, it occurred to me that I could hear myself talk at cheaper rates.

You'll still be able to find archived versions at Internet Archive, using http://www.thescelosaurus.com/ (although be very, very careful, because the domain was purchased by other people over the years; the only archives you can be sure are mine predate April 2015, and even then sometimes you get redirected to a more recent version that is very much not mine!), or if you're really desperate, I'm still going to be holding on to the files. Maybe I'll add to them; I don't know. As for alternative sources, I recommend the dinosaur articles at Wikipedia, which at the very least are on par with my own entries and usually much better (and include sources of information), and the Supplementary Information for Thomas R. Holtz, Jr.'s encyclopedia. In particular, the updated versions of the genera list are like mine, only much better. You're welcome to copy the pages for your own use, but I don't want someone else to continue the website because of my concerns with the quality of the content.

I'd like to thank everyone who made a correction, offered a tip, said hello, or found the site to be useful over the years. I'm glad to have had a good long run. I'll still be writing here, so I suppose I'll have to write a bit more often about dinosaurs to make up for it.

5 comments:

  1. End of an era! Sounds like a good decision on the whole, though. Glad to hear your blogging will continue here, though!

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  2. I'm pretty sad you are closing down Thescelosaurus! but given your explanation, I can understand your decision very well. Still, I feel it might leave a gap not to have a regularly updated and trustworthy site about dinosaur taxonomy and classification. Alas, sic transit gloria mundi.

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  3. I cannot thank you enough for keeping Thescelosaurus all these years. I've been a follower all these years and even in this era where your site looks like a leftover from those 90s dinosaur sites it was your site, not the other ones, that I visited first and daily. I really liked the simplicity of it, a page for each major group, a phylogenetic tree updated to the most recent findings and the way you treated each taxon, with a short description for each one. I felt it was perfect, it gave it a touch of personality, it wasn't just a dry encyclopedic entry.
    I like dinosaurs very much of course like you do so your site has been very important for me all these years, so all I want to say is thank you for your work and dedication, Thescelosaurus really meant something to me. From the bottom of my hearth I thank you from keeping it all these years, even when it was too tiresome for you to keep.
    Thank you so much and good luck here in Equatorial Minnesota and in other future projects
    Jorge Câmara

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  4. Well, and that's that. Thank you to everyone who wrote in over the past couple of weeks! I'm considering ways to reuse some of the content, but I don't think there would be anything public until the second half of the year.

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  5. Can't really put it any better than Jorge, the website was wonderful and massively useful, I already miss it.

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