The Pattern
Library of Juggling—a pre-2015 hobbyist website archiving juggling tricks with mathematical siteswap notation and animated tutorials—announced an indefinite hiatus in June 2015. The last update added five tricks including "Frostbite." The site remains online but static.
For context: Siteswap notation mathematically encodes juggling patterns ("531" describes throw heights and timing), enabling software like JugglingLab to generate visual animations. Library of Juggling cataloged tricks from the Cascade to Romeo's Revenge with difficulty ratings, prerequisites, and text tutorials alongside these animations.
What Happened
Nothing recently. The hiatus predates most modern juggling platforms by years. The site appears in resource compilations like GitHub's awesome-juggling list and Juggling Edge, but receives no active development. A Hacker News discussion 11+ months ago praised the siteswap abstraction but noted the community had already moved toward video documentation (platforms like passing.zone) over animation-based learning.
Historical juggling archives exist—Mary Wilkins maintained a physical collection, and New Juggling Tricks published in 1901—but digital pattern databases face a fundamental challenge: they require sustained volunteer effort in a hobby without commercial scale.
Why This Matters (Or Doesn't)
It doesn't, for enterprise tech readers. But the pattern is familiar: niche technical documentation projects launched by enthusiasts, useful to their communities, eventually going static when maintainers move on. No business model supports a juggling trick database. The community adapted—modern jugglers use Skilldex for sharing, video tutorials on YouTube, and other tools that emerged after 2015.
The site's continued hosting (no new content, but existing pages remain) represents a common outcome for volunteer-maintained technical resources. The information stays available. The project stays finished, not abandoned. The community finds what works next.
No lessons here for CIOs. Sometimes a website is just a website that served its purpose and stopped.