Plans to Close The Autistic Place

This blog is continuing but in the next week or two, I will be terminating The Autistic Place -- a failed attempt to create a Web portal for all things autism.

The Autistic Me has many readers and seems to serve a purpose.

While I might be recognizing the impossibility of establishing a thriving portal in a virtual world with far too many autism-related Web sites, I am not going to stop blogging. In fact, I think terminating the relatively inert portal is going to free up a little tiny bit of time and energy to focus on other tasks.

Updating the Drupal CMS and the backend databases proved to take a few hours every month. Yet, there were never any active users for the Web site.

For those seeking autism-related portals, there are many of them. I was unable to create something better -- and definitely not able to fund any sort of advertising campaign to launch a portal.

One of the things I am noticing is that the Internet itself is evolving. The mailing lists I have read for years are slowly dwindling. The Usenet groups I read religiously on matters of programming were discontinued by my ISP two years ago. Online forums are less active, too.

So, I am admitting that The Autistic Place never worked out. It didn't become an alternative to Yahoo Groups or LiveJournal for people interested in autism. I was the only regular user. A community of one.

The domain autisticplace.com will be forwarded to this blog until it expires sometime in the next few months. Who knows, this might even result in more traffic and readers for this blog!

Keep reading The Autistic Me. I'm not going anywhere, yet.

If anyone has a reason to keep The Autistic Place, let me know. Right now, I don't see much reason to salvage the portal.