It’s never cool when a fellow Sonic webmaster gets hit with the trials and tribulations that real life brings, and it looks like the latest casualty is Aussie comedy corner and hoax resource Sonic Vegemite. Before The Sonic Stadium changed radically into a blog-powered resource, I was pretty much in the same boat. Shit just wasn’t getting done, and the will and desire to update simply wasn’t there anymore.
While the problem with Matt Newman’s site isn’t so much a lack of interest on his part (although it is mentioned in a recent update post) it appears people just keep sending the guy too much stuff. “We’ve gotta be one of the only Sonic websites I know where [we close because] the webmaster simply gets too much submitted.”
It must have been troublesome to keep juggling all those “What Cheeses Me Off” entries with RL concerns. Anyone who’s had to maintain an HTML-powered site and manually add contributions will feel that pain. The lack of time to update is the reason why many Sonic fansites either fizzle out or get watered down greatly once the webmaster leaves university (although I’m still here for some reason), and it’s a sad fact of life really.
So another long-standing (the site’s been open for over five years, and Matt’s been a regular in the Sonic community since my old Moogle Cavern haunt days in 1999) website and community figure steps down. However, it doesn’t look like it’ll be the last we see of the Vegemite fanatic – apparently the plan is to start updates going again and continue until the backlog is rid.
Until then, I didn’t want Sonic Vegemite to go out with a whimper, so it’s here that I wish Matt and his site all the best, and hopefully he can return so I can talk about how superior Marmite is.