LocalFox's Blog Adventures

Death.

07/17/26

okay well the title is a bit dramatic its not that serious.

July 16th, 2026

i woke up at 4am. nobody else is around. i am alone.

the thought of death and what will be left of me courses through my mind.

how will people remember me? i am filled with terror at the thought.

What does it mean to have died twice?

There is a common saying that you die twice.

The first is when you actually die, and the second is when your name is said for the very last time.

Okay, well, the project i'm about to discuss goes deeper than that, to be blunt, almost directly inspired by All The Ghosts You Will Be by Vsauce/Michael Stevens

The Death Clock

If you are viewing this website during or after 07/17/26 then you will have most likely noticed the Death Clock in the lower left corner (pictured below for clarity)

So what is it? And why does it matter?

This is a live (and most likely) accurate countdown to the expiration date of the website. To explain that you probably need a bit more context on how websites exist on the internet first though.

All websites exist on domains, www.youtube.com for example, or like this one, www.localfox.dev, but realistically, most people don't own the domains they use, they only rent them temporarily from registrars such as CloudFlare.

And that's where The Death Clock comes in, it is a countdown to when my ownership of localfox.dev expires.

Why does this matter though?

See, I have the domain on auto-renewal, which means that when the time comes (usually about 30 days before expiration), Cloudflare will auto-charge me the cost of the domain and give me another year.

But when I die, this auto-renewal will eventually fail. I can pay for many years in advance of course, which I will probably do when I have the funds, but even that will run out eventually.

And when it does, that means that there will be a day where that clock never goes back up. It will only ever from that point onward countdown to the expiration of my ownership of the domain.

When the ownership of this domain expires, so does the website. Sort of, the website will probably still exist on the account. But because I haven't paid for the domain, they won't host this there anymore.

There's also archives and local copies on my hard drives, but this specific version of this website, the only truly live copy, will have died, and with it, the largest living memory of my existence. probably.

How does it work and why is it only most likely accurate and not 100%?

The way it works is simple, every domain has an expiration date, its part of the RDAP (Registration Data Access Protocol) and you can look it up for free at any time in many places including ICANN. Even the big websites have one.

Using WHOISJson.com I can access my own domain's expiration date with an API that I can call whenever I want, and automatically at that. That is where it pulls the expiration date from, and then calcuates that from the current date to create the countdown.

There's a bit more to it than that, but that'll have to wait for when I make an actual guide on how to make your own for your website to get into the specific details.

As to why its not 100% accurate, well it only updates the actual date once per day as part of my code, and to save on API calls. But also, this website could go down earlier or later for any number of reasons.

Maybe I have a subscription on Cloudflare that I forgot about in the future and it means they close my account before the registration expires, maybe they give me a grace period to pay for the domain after it expires. Maybe they leave the website on that domain until someone else buys it, I don't know.

There's no way for me to be 100% accurate, but this is about as close as I can get.