bye-bye GeoCities, and the stuff that Dream*s are made of
As some of you may have heard, GeoCities is closing down. Lots of fandom people have sites there; I think my first fannish website was GeoCities, in fact, although that's back in the dim mists of time. bethbethbeth reminds people to keep local backups of their websites and to make sure that current links to their work are on their journals, a plea with which I totally agree; some of you may recall my website debacle a few years ago, la la la.
I did a quick check (yay for database search!) and discovered that only two of the stories in my recs are hosted at GeoCities, and it was easy enough to find alternate sites for them, fortunately. (Well, for one; for the other, the author has acknowledged she needs to copy it somewhere else, but has a link set up already to her LJ where it will be.)
The comment I made, which I think is worth repeating here: if you move your website - particularly if the old site disappears completely so a redirect isn't possible - put the text URL and the site name in meta tags and text on the new site. After arithmancy.net imploded, even after my new site had been up for nearly a year I was getting comments on LJ entries asking, "Where are your stories now? My links are broken and I can't find your site!" I realized that it was important to make sure that a web search on "arithmancy.net" would bring up my new site, hieroglyfics.net. (Googling it now brings up hieroglyfics.net as the second hit, behind a page about Arithmancy at Hogwarts.)
Speaking of moving websites: Dreamhost is offering two years of free hosting plus domain name to the first 1000 current GeoCities customers to sign up with them. My website was hosted with Dreamhost for several years, and I had no problems with them other than, um, see debacle link above. But that was my fault.
Finally and tangentially: I discovered this offer because after idlerat posted about being a little discombobulated by discovering that a discussion she had followed on DW had a parallel and completely different comment thread on LJ, I checked bethbethbeth's DW (I only subscribe to one or the other journals of crossposters) and sure enough, she had posted there too, and of course there was a different set of comments, one of which pointed to the Dreamhost link. Now, originally I was planning on crossposting and not forcing comments to either service. But now I am rethinking this, because fragmenting of discussion is a bad thing. I am not sure whether I want to not direct comments, or not crosspost. Or something else.
I did a quick check (yay for database search!) and discovered that only two of the stories in my recs are hosted at GeoCities, and it was easy enough to find alternate sites for them, fortunately. (Well, for one; for the other, the author has acknowledged she needs to copy it somewhere else, but has a link set up already to her LJ where it will be.)
The comment I made, which I think is worth repeating here: if you move your website - particularly if the old site disappears completely so a redirect isn't possible - put the text URL and the site name in meta tags and text on the new site. After arithmancy.net imploded, even after my new site had been up for nearly a year I was getting comments on LJ entries asking, "Where are your stories now? My links are broken and I can't find your site!" I realized that it was important to make sure that a web search on "arithmancy.net" would bring up my new site, hieroglyfics.net. (Googling it now brings up hieroglyfics.net as the second hit, behind a page about Arithmancy at Hogwarts.)
Speaking of moving websites: Dreamhost is offering two years of free hosting plus domain name to the first 1000 current GeoCities customers to sign up with them. My website was hosted with Dreamhost for several years, and I had no problems with them other than, um, see debacle link above. But that was my fault.
Finally and tangentially: I discovered this offer because after idlerat posted about being a little discombobulated by discovering that a discussion she had followed on DW had a parallel and completely different comment thread on LJ, I checked bethbethbeth's DW (I only subscribe to one or the other journals of crossposters) and sure enough, she had posted there too, and of course there was a different set of comments, one of which pointed to the Dreamhost link. Now, originally I was planning on crossposting and not forcing comments to either service. But now I am rethinking this, because fragmenting of discussion is a bad thing. I am not sure whether I want to not direct comments, or not crosspost. Or something else.