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Post by Angmar on May 8, 2009 6:33:29 GMT
Geocities will be cancelling all of its free homepages later this year. Their stated reason is "We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year." Translated, this means they want their patrons to start paying $4.99 a month for the first 12 months, and then $9.95 for every month after. Obviously, this will spell the doom for a lot of material on the internet. Many people will not pay the prices and their pages will simply disappear. The internet might be a less crowded place in the future. Read all about it here: smallbusiness.yahoo.com/webhosting/webhostingup.phpWhat this means for us is that in a few months (unless Yahoo-Geocities reconsiders, and they probably won't) is that both The Circles website and Second Darkness will disappear. Elfhild and I are going to look into finding another free server. In the meantime, we will be working extra hard to get chapters from Book Two and Three on Henneth Annun and LOTRFF so that they will have a public home. We will be keeping you posted on our future plans.
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Post by Agan on May 8, 2009 9:56:27 GMT
Ugh, what a bad news.... What about other providers? I have found a few: only it is difficult to say whether they are affiliated with Yahoo or not. Here is one (Trypod/Lycos) that swears not to shut down their free pages: help.lycos.com/kb_article.php?s=74215a731891290a1abdc06663fb2c60&ref=6724-QWYI-9658 Official: Tripod/Lycos are NOT shutting down
Howdy, Tripod Members.
Tripod and Lycos are NOT shutting down. Your free/paid sites are fine. It's Lycos UK/Tripod UK that have announced their shutdown. The UK company licensed the Lycos/Tripod name and some technology years ago, but has NOTHING to do with the original/core Lycos/Tripod that we run here in snowy Waltham, MA, USA.
(Yeah, I know it sounds a bit strange...just think of it like those step-cousins who share the same last name, but that you never talk to, and have no idea what they're up to.)
So, again, Tripod and Lycos aren't going anywhere. In fact, the team and I are working hard to get out some exciting new features and upgrades. We're in Alpha testing now, and should have something for you to see in late Feb./early March. Ditto for Lycos Domains, and the domains you may have bought through Tripod or Angelfire. All's fine there, new stuff coming soon.
If you happen to have a site on Tripod UK that's getting shutdown, feel free to FTP-down your contents from that site, save them to your desktop, and then upload them to your Tripod.com site here. While we don't necessarily support all of the same technologies as the UK version currently, just sit tight.
Thanks for your ongoing support of Tripod and Lycos here in the USA (and globally across the World Wide Web). We've been around a long time, thanks to you, and we intend to be around for a lot longer.
Thanks.
Jamie Riehle,
Director of Product Infrastructure/Tripod/Angelfire
Lycos, Inc. Here are their instructions how to upload your existing webpages: www.tripod.lycos.com/guides/move.htmlSounds easy, but my experience tells me it won't be as easy as it sounds...
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Post by Elfhild on May 9, 2009 5:13:08 GMT
Agan, thanks for the tip. Lycos/Tripod and Angelfire offer 20 mb for sites, which is more than Geocities's 15 mb. However, those two hosting companies have a really annoying anti-direct linking policy. I can see why companies wouldn't want their bandwidth being used for a file dump, as this would bypass any opportunity to earn ad revenue, but Tripod/Angelfire are really strict about the matter. Say we had a map or painting which was really too large to look good on a page. We would give readers the option to click a link to get to the file. However, the reader would get an error message from the server whenever they clicked that link, as the company considers it direct linking (even though the file is being linked from a page hosted on their servers!). Also, if we wanted to share the url of a single page or image, the error messages would come up again, or the image would show up as a big X. See what I mean about annoying? They may have changed their policies over the years, but this is my experience with them. I found this site that tells you straight up how much file storage different free web hosting services offer. Unfortunately, I don't know how financially stable these hosts are. We'll definitely be checking a few of these out. Any suggestions/tips/warnings would be appreciated. www.100best-free-web-space.com/searchPage2/Free-Host.html
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Post by Elfhild on May 24, 2009 2:08:39 GMT
An update on the hosting search situation. It's not the 90's anymore when every little hosting company offered unlimited memory requirements on individual files and an eternity on the internet. Many sites call the line at 300k or 500k sized files (which probably won't affect The Circles or Second Darkness, since everything is mostly text...but it might have an effect on images such as maps, art, etc.). Also, many companies will now delete your site if it has been inactive for 30 days. This probably won't be a problem for The Circles, but it might be for Second Darkness, as it is mostly an archive site.
There is a minor issue which we don't really think is much of an issue, unless someone is really conservative. The Circles gets a little racy at times, and every host (unless it's an adult host) has a clause which forbids obscene and vulgar material. Well, I don't think of The Circles as either obscene or vulgar, especially when taken as a whole. I mean, come on, we spend more time describing trees than body parts. It's not "Celebrian," which, incidentally, can be found on many sites that ban vulgar and obscene material. However, I did find one host which banned all erotic material, even naughty literature. We'll look elsewhere.
I found a new website which gives loads more reviews than the one above and uses a 1 - 10 rating scale. These reviews are really helpful and hopefully keep users from signing up with a real stinker of a host. I had considered one host, 50m.com, but discovered from the reviews that their ads sometimes contain adware and spyware.
I'm sort of looking at Byet Hosting as a possibility. Other possibilities are 50Webs, Dhost, and LeadHoster. All of these hosts had good reviews. All offer generous memory and bandwidth, and several are, incidentally, ad free. Not sure about that, as one site review warned users to stay away from gimmicky ad free servers as they may be hit by the recession. We don't care about ads, but I would like to stay away from pop ups, as they annoy readers.
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Post by khazarkhum on May 24, 2009 7:26:33 GMT
I don't think anyone has a problem with banner ads; they can be useful for finding interesting sites & such. But may the fleas and lice of a thousand Mordor Orcs feast upon the pubic mounds of the creature that invented pop-ups!
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Post by Elfhild on Jun 5, 2009 9:47:35 GMT
Just signed onto Geocities and got this notice. It doesn't apply to Geocities pages, but to 360 Degrees, Yahoo's failed MySpace clone. I guess Geocities will be closing sometime after July.
"Yahoo! 360° is closing on July 13, 2009. If you have a 360° blog on your site, note that your blog content will not be deleted; however, after July 1, 2009, you will no longer be able to add or edit posts, and we will freeze your blog pages."
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Post by Agan on Jun 5, 2009 17:45:39 GMT
You should hurry, I think. Have you made a decision on the new provider?
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Post by khazarkhum on Jun 6, 2009 1:42:07 GMT
My BIL works for Yahoo!
The stated reason for closing: No one is using it.
WTF
The real reason, of course, is that they are losing money.
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Post by Elfhild on Jun 6, 2009 5:52:24 GMT
Agan, I'm having second thoughts on Byet. They have a thirty day inactivity limit before they pull a site down. We usually update more often than every thirty days, but what if we are really busy, either with offline matters or with a plotline? We sort of become slaves to the company, always updating to make sure our site stays online.
Because so many sites have 30 - 100 days inactivity limits, Angmar and I have discussed of combining The Circles and Second Darkness into a collective so that Second Darkness does not get deleted due to lack of updates. I have drafted a main index page which gives links to The Circles, Second Darkness, the Nazgul Information Page, and the Black Speech pages. The links are accompanied by text and images to attract the interest of the reader. The individual pages would look almost identical to the ones that are currently online. A proposed name for the new site is "The Library of Minas Morgul." Angmar likes the look, but again, I'm not sure if we are going to go with the collective idea.
I found two more sites which give links to free hosting companies. Check out this quote from HinduWebsite: "Following are some of the Free Web hosting Services verified and found to be still functional. Many from the original list compiled in the early 200's have disappeared. It is still possible that some of these companies might also cease providing free web hosting services. So if a link disappoints you, please use another." Unfortunately, the list is not really up to date. Some of the sites have gone under and their domains are for sale. But what the HinduWebsite manager is saying is the truth. Many hosts from the 90's and early 2000's are gone. I wasn't really aware of this until now.
Another possible host is 007Sites. They have banner ads, but offer a lot of memory and have no inactivity limit.
EDIT: Cross off 007Sites. They allow only squeaky clean, family friendly sites.
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Post by Elfhild on Jun 6, 2009 5:59:21 GMT
Khazar, here is a quote from Wikipedia about GeoCities:
"Rupert Goodwins, the editor of ZDNet, perceived the closure of GeoCities as an end of an era; he described GeoCities as 'the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.'18] Vijay Mukhi, an internet and cyber security expert quoted in the Business Standard, criticized Yahoo's handling of GeoCities; Mukhi described GeoCities as 'a lost opportunity for Yahoo! They could have made it a Facebook if they wanted.' Rich Skrenta, the CEO of Blekko, offered to buy GeoCities from Yahoo![20]"
That pretty much sums it up. Yahoo should have sold it to someone instead of cancelling a service that so many people used.
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