{"id":231,"slug":"longevity-named-examples-2026","title":"Long-lived sites worth studying: Daring Fireball, Berkshire Hathaway, Craigslist, Pinboard, GOV.UK, Stack Overflow, Wikipedia","kind":"reference","scope":"business","status":"current","audiences":["kevin","claude-code","candid-team"],"topics":["content-architecture","longevity-architecture"],"reference_body":"**Catalogue of sites that have run 10+ years without ground-up rebuild — the empirical foundation for the \"build to last\" argument.**\n\n- **Daring Fireball (since 2002):** Movable Type, self-hosted on Linode, static HTML output. *Content separated from presentation; one author = one stack owner.*\n- **Berkshire Hathaway (since 1997):** Same HTML structure since 1997. Page weight ~**198 KB**; load time ~**116 ms** — orders of magnitude better than the modern average (median page is 2.56 MB per [[web-almanac-2024-page-weight-per-cms]]). *A brochure site that is just HTML can outlast a 30-year company without modification.*\n- **Craigslist:** Plain HTML, table-based layout; survived 25+ years of \"modernization\" trends; consistently profitable. *Usability over fashion compounds.*\n- **Hacker News (since 2007):** Custom Lisp/Arc stack; intentional feature freeze; near-zero design churn. *Scope discipline is an architectural choice.*\n- **Wikipedia / MediaWiki:** Open-source CMS, structured wikitext + templates, separated from skin/presentation. *Structured content survives presentation changes.*\n- **Stack Overflow (since 2008):** Custom .NET; question/answer schema versioned for URL stability; permalinks preserved across redesigns. *URL design is permanence design.*\n- **GOV.UK (since 2012):** Government Digital Service built on content store + APIs + reusable design system. Per GDS: *\"pages on GOV.UK built with the Design System download about twice as fast as those that haven't, as they use about half as much code.\"* See [[govuk-design-system-2x-faster-half-code]].\n- **Pinboard (since 2009):** Plain PHP + MySQL + Perl scripts; explicitly chose *\"boring architecture is a feature\"*; serves tens of thousands of paying users on modest hardware. *Tech choices constrained by \"what one person can operate forever\" drive longevity.*\n- **Joel on Software (since 2000):** Custom CMS, continuous publication, archive intact and linkable. *URL stability + plain text + RSS = a 25-year asset.*\n\n**Common pattern across all of them:** Content separated from presentation. Minimal dependencies. URL stability as a design principle. Boring architecture as a feature. None of them rebuilt every 3 years.","rationale_body":null,"metadata":null,"links":{"outgoing":[{"slug":"web-almanac-2024-page-weight-per-cms","title":"Web Almanac 2024: median desktop page weight — WordPress 2,252 KB, Wix 2,560, Squarespace 3,323; 90th pct crosses 8 MB","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}],"incoming":[{"slug":"govuk-design-system-2x-faster-half-code","title":"GDS: GOV.UK Design System pages download 2x faster than non-system pages with half the code","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"},{"slug":"rule-build-for-10-year-horizon","title":"RULE: Design every Candid client site for a 10-year operational horizon. Rebuild is a choice, not a forced move.","kind":"rule","scope":"business","link_type":"depends-on"},{"slug":"research-brief-built-to-last","title":"Research brief: Built to Last — why most SMB sites rebuild every 3-4 years (piece 5 of 15)","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"},{"slug":"research-first-named-practitioners-2026","title":"Reference: 8 named exemplars of research-first/docs-as-product methodology — Stripe, Twilio, Anthropic, Gwern, Matuschak, Appleton, BAM, Construction Physics","kind":"reference","scope":"business","link_type":"relates-to"}]},"created_at":"2026-05-22T19:58:12.873Z","updated_at":"2026-05-22T19:58:12.873Z"}