Embrace your fails.

Everyone of us tends, over the years, to collect a pile of stuff that you really don’t use and probably ever will however we refuse to throw them away. The same happens with web projects.

It could be a client’s website that never got to production, a small proof-of-concept that lasted for a couple of days online, or the documentation of that amazing new website that was going to be the next [INSERT SUCCESSFUL DOMAIN HERE] but you didn’t have the time to fully develop.

I’ve always tried to accomplish such projects and some of them are still online. Others, on the other hand, after producing significant losses just on the fees, ended up domain-less as a folder in my servers and nothing else, as the price to renew those domains increased (from free to 15 USD for Argentinian domains currently) or simply because they turned to be god damned difficult to renew.

So today, actually thinking about a subject to write, I found them. And as in some kind of archeology, I recovered those with the idea of leaving them online under some subdomain, as an example of those projects that even if they aren’t successful (depending on what your meaning of successful is), they were learning opportunities. They are our fails, and as such we need to embrace them. They represent the opportunity to learn something. They’re our 99% perspiration, the stepping stones that took you into another, better fail or even better, to your successes.

Some of my fails include:

• Blogs about deceased TV Series, just because I had a nice domain to go with it.
• Typosquatting domain with related content (sometimes better than the original domain)
• A Virtual Senate, where people could register, propose, discuss and vote for laws.
• An idea gathering website (ala Uservoice) for a fans website.
• A website to sell all my stuff before moving to The Netherlands, that took an Apple-ish look, just using Twitter Bootstrap.
• And on and on and on…