Back online

[igenlode]

I finally got my personal website (which vanished off the face of the Web a couple of months ago when the hosting site decided to close down its services after ten years) back online, thanks to the useful advice at Techradar.
Free Web Hosting Area is billed as being suitable for "seasoned veterans", since any users are required to upload their own files via FTP rather than using a 'site installer' package. That happened to be exactly what I was looking for, since any site that does require you to use its bells-and-whistles features almost certainly isn't compatible with my existing custom software!
I managed to do the signup and installation without JavaScript, too, which is always a plus. The reviews also describes it as looking like 'a website from 1999', which is likewise a good sign in my experience :-p

So my web pages are now available from http://ivory.ueuo.com/Tower/ instead of http://ivory.vlexofree.com/Tower - the main problem I can see is that if you don't get any Web traffic they will delete your site, which is fair enough from their point of view (they don't want to waste storage space on dead web pages, and they can't display advertising that doesn't get viewed), but means a certain amount of self-promotion, since all the links that led to my old site are now broken. (Which is one point of posting this here... ironically, one of the reasons why I originally started my Livejournal blog was because you could set up a set of links to display in the sidebar on every page, and I'd seen this recommended as a way to direct web crawlers to your site!
That was back in the days when people used to find fan-fiction by doing a web search to locate it on all the individual authors' personal sites, rather than by watching large archives classified by fandom; it's been a very long time since my stats showed up hits for search strings like "Norrington PotC fanfiction", although to be fair since Google started hiding the keywords in their search referrals not many search strings are viewable at all.
But most of the search engine traffic I get is on the Sonnie Hale pages nowadays.

Comments

[butterflydreaming]

Wow! It's refreshing to see such a clean layout.

[igenlode]

*grin* Well, 'clean layout' is one way of putting it... it's what happens when you hand-code for compatibility with text-mode browsers, and don't update it in fifteen years or so!

This is a slightly more complex layout based on more than just bullet-point lists: http://ivory.ueuo.com/Tower/Sonnie-Hale/sample/index.html

[pedanther]

I regret I can't help you with the web traffic, because my site that used to link to yours is down and probably staying down for the foreseeable future.

(The hosting company took it down a while back after I forgot to update my credit card details, and it took months for anybody to notice - including me - which I took as an indication of how much it mattered whether it stayed up. I still have all the files, but I've learned so much about web design since I created it that I wouldn't feel comfortable sticking it back up without redoing everything, so reviving it would take considerable time and effort.)

[igenlode]

Just as well you reminded me -- I'd completely forgotten I'm supposed to have the Pro-Fun Hoedown hosted up there as well! (It was in a separate directory from the other 600-plus files that are the main part of the site...)
I'll have to work out how it was supposed to link, and do some brute-force search and replacement; there seem to be a lot of hardwired links back to the old site (and in some cases the one before that). Even the hit counter used is obsolete.

I still have all the files, but I've learned so much about web design since I created it that I wouldn't feel comfortable sticking it back up without redoing everything

As you can see, I didn't bother ;-(

[pedanther]

If my site had a 'clean layout' too, I might well not bother either. The trouble is that I gave it quite a complicated layout, because I could, and now there are bits of it that I could do much better and probably bits that don't work at all any more.

[betweensunandmoon]

Looks lovely!