What's happened to Mind-it?

The people who provide the Mind-it service that announces changes to web pages have told me that the service will no longer be free. From March 2001, web sites who want to have the buttons and have visitors told about changes will have to pay. If the cost was going to be reasonable I wouldn't care, but they want $US795 per year. I suppose some genius multiplied the number of buttons by a number of dollars and said "Wow! Look what we are missing out on!" I see a lot of web sites and an enormous majority of those with a Mind-it button are non-commercial or hobby sites like this one or belong to quite small businesses. These aren't the sort of people who have a spare $795 lying around, so my two predictions are that hardly anyone will pay the money and Mind-it will disappear in the next twelve months.

So, what am I going to do about it? Mind-it suited me because I didn't particularly want to know who visited the site unless the visitors chose to email me directly (I had no access to the Mind-it list of registered visitors). As soon as I can write an acceptable privacy and reassurance statement, I will have a form here so visitors can register an email address to be told about changes.