Create a self-expiring homepage

Martin Brinkmann
Oct 4, 2007
Updated • Nov 12, 2013
Development
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2

Self-expiring, disposable or temporary emails have been around for some time and are quite useful for quickly joining a website that forces its users to register before they can see the content or participate. Disposable Websites on the other hand is a concept that I never heard before.

Create a website that is valid for a maximum of 90 days before it expires and gets deleted. The basic editor gives you  some options like adding tables, links, images and text paragraphs. What puzzles me at the moment is the use of such a service. The only use that comes to my mind would be a temporary homepage for a project that is also expiring after 90 days.

The option to issue editor keys to friends to give them edit rights as well seems to point in that direction. It is furthermore possible to set the expiration time of the homepage to an earlier date. The maximum however is 90 days.

Can you think of any other applications for this service ? I would love to hear your thoughts about it.

Update: The service is still around and almost 30,000 homepages that went offline after 90 days or earlier have been created so far. There are a couple of scenarios that I can think of today that may make sense.

I have already mentioned options to create a homepage for a project that is lasting 90 days or less. Other possible scenarios include creating a campaign page or a giveaway page that is time limited. There is also the option to create a page that acts as an invitation for an event in the next 90 days, or a page for a loved one that you want to expire after a birthday, Valentine's day or another day you specify.

Basically, it is an option if you want to publish contents to the Internet that you only want to be available for a set time period before you want them to be removed again automatically.

Please note that caching by third party services may still mean that the contents will be available on the Internet even after the website itself got terminated automatically.

It is therefore not a secure solution, especially since there are no options to protect the contents with a password or by other means.

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Comments

  1. Dante said on October 4, 2007 at 2:35 pm
    Reply

    A good use of this will be for the bot farmers. Send out email vectored bots and than have the zombies dial into the temp website for instructions. After which, everything self destructs.

    But this is a stretch for a “good use”. Anyone with any brains would have the bots look at a select newsgroup to download instructions anonymously.

    However, if the infectious agent is used to gather user info, than sending the targets’ info to a temp website would be more useful than a newsgroup. While downloading the targets’ info from newsgroups is a lot more anonymous, it’s also subject to leakage to rival hackers. A temporary website that you have control over would control who has access to your farm’s data.

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