Keoki and Lani
This was the index page for a series of short stories written on the blog through 2009. It listed the instalments in order and linked to each one.
The series
Eight instalments were listed here, in this order:
- Keoki and Lani
- Keoki and Lani’s Vacation
- Keoki and Lani Return
- Keoki and Lani’s Picnic
- Keoki and Lani’s New Day
- Keoki, Lani and George
- Keoki and Lani Return
- Keoki and Lani Say Goodbye
The titles are all that survives. The instalments themselves were never captured — the archive holds this index and nothing behind it — and they are not being reconstructed here. Writing new fiction and putting somebody else’s name on it is not restoration, whatever it might look like on the page, and a story that ends with “Say Goodbye” deserves better than a guess at what happened in it.
So the index stands as an index. It is a table of contents for a book that is no longer in the building.
Reading the titles
You can tell a certain amount from a list of eight titles even so. Keoki and Lani are the Hawaiian forms of George and Rose — which makes the sixth instalment, “Keoki, Lani and George”, either a joke or a complication, and possibly both. The sequence runs through a vacation, a return, a picnic and a new day before it says goodbye, which is the shape of something gentler and more domestic than dramatic.
If you want the names properly rather than as a guess, the standard Hawaiian dictionaries are searchable at Wehewehe, and the Hawaiian-language collections at Ulukau hold a great deal of the real literature that a series like this was, at some distance, echoing.
Where the writing went instead
The fiction habit did not stop when the series did — it moved into a format with other people in it. Portrait of Words, the monthly writing challenge hosted here from 2010, handed out five photographic prompts a month and asked anyone who fancied it to build a story from them. It ran for a year before being retired for lack of participation, and its guidelines are fully preserved.
Between the two, the second one is the more interesting survival. A serial that only its author could continue is gone for good. A set of prompts and rules is still usable by anybody who reads it, which is a strange and quite cheering thing for the more disposable-looking of the two to turn out to be true of.
Why the serials went missing and the pages didn’t
It is worth explaining how a page like this one survives while everything it links to does not, because the pattern is not random and it explains most of what is and isn’t on this site.
Web archives crawl what other people link to. A page that sat permanently in the blog’s top menu was reachable from every single post, which meant crawlers hit it on every visit for three years — this index exists in dozens of copies. An individual instalment of a serial, by contrast, was linked from exactly one place: here. It sat on the front page for a day or two, then slid down and off it, and unless somebody outside happened to link to that specific instalment, a crawler had a narrow window to catch it and mostly didn’t.
Multiply that across the roughly one thousand posts this blog published and you get the shape of what survived: the menu pages nearly all of them, the posts a small handful — and of that handful, disproportionately the ones that other blogs linked to, because those got crawled from outside as well. That is why the one Muffed Target post that made it through is precisely the one that carried the rules everybody else was linking to for reference.
The practical consequence, for anyone arriving on an old link to an instalment: those addresses now redirect here rather than 404, because a page about the series is a more honest answer than nothing, and considerably more honest than a page inventing what the instalment said.
Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou