Wed, Apr 22nd - 10:10AM
How WebRing Saved My Butt and My Website
by Gail M Feldman (genessa)
When I joined AOL in March 1994, the organization didn't offer its members any webspace; it wasn't something any of us were imagining. Whatever would we use it for?
When AOL did begin to offer us the opportunity to make our own homepages, it was through a template which asked us such burning questions as our age, our hobbies, our favorite colors... just what everyone wants and needs on a website, right?
So I began to teach myself HTML in self-defense, really, and fortunately AOL did offer a rather difficult-to-find but easy-to-use FTP service. It was all free, AOL didn't clutter up my precious pages with ads, and for fourteen and a half years I built my site.
Oh, at first it was a magazine; then it was a tarot service. Then, in 1997, just after my mother died, I decided to make a commercial site to sell watches and jewelry, mostly because I had inherited her contact lists (she and Dad, and then she alone after his death, had sold such things, rather successfully, too, at a large flea market). That site expanded and contracted and went through changes, but all the while, it sat in AOL's webspace for 11 years.
Then without warning, it ended. AOL swears it sent email to members; some members claim to have received emails. I received nothing. On October 30, 2008, my site existed. On October 31, it didn't. AOL had shut down what had become its Hometown, permanently.
I went into shock. I was mentally paralyzed for three weeks! Then a friend directed me to a forum in which some kind soul had posted directions for rescuing stuff from AOL's now ghostly webspace. I followed them and rescued all but one bit of music, now lost forever, because I misspelled one of my defunct screen names. (I won't give those instructions here because they will no longer work; the ghosts have all passed on to the other side.)
Bolstered by this good luck, I began searching for other free webspace and found what I wanted at Free Homepages. Free Homepages offered a selection of domains, none of which thrilled me, but the least offensive was usapages, so I chose that and began to upload. Boy, did I upload!
Since the webspace offered was large but not unlimited, I decided to put all the graphics into Photobucket and only upload pages and what little music I had into usapages. This worked well but took a long time because, of course, my index by this time was immense. And being a considerate webmistress, I have the index on every page.
This means I had to change all the index links, not to mention any random internal links in the text, to reflect my site's new home. Six months later, I was still working on it but had it largely under control, when suddenly my site once more failed to exist!
I waited three days for usapages to come back up. It never did. I eventually found out that the company, to whom I wrote and from whom I never received even the tiniest response, was based in Costa Rica, which I hadn't known. They had let their domain registrations lapse - without bothering to inform its members. Sound familiar?
Now let's backtrack six months. When AOL dumped everyone, everyone affected began to get suspension notices from WebRing if they happened to be members. I was, and did. Boy, did I! I must've gotten 70 or so suspension notices.
I had joined WebRing pretty darned close to its inception, probably in 1997, and had even created a ring (which still exists, with the description I wrote for it intact, although it's now managed by someone else). I had not really understood what management entailed, and been distracted by, um, let's call it life. Now my mailbox was being flooded with suspension notices!
I came to WebRing and was astonished at how it had changed. I quickly figured out how to change the registered URLs and as I restored each registered page to its usapages location, I fixed it with WebRing too, and started getting reactivation notices instead of suspension notices. Thus, I let WebRing determine which pages to restore first.
As I did all this, I became more and more involved in WebRing, began to manage rings, began to make friends, began to learn a lot, and here I am today, a 2.0 member, a Super-User and a WebRing addict.
But let's flash forward again. Early April 2009 found this addict suddenly siteless! And in rolled those suspension notices once more!
As I said, I waited three days to see if usapages was magically about to reappear, but I didn't wait idly; I started researching other free hosts, and I must say I was disheartened and even sometimes disgusted by what I found. Luckily, on the third day, thanks to my habit of voicing my feelings to my friends in the Shoutbox, I was informed that WebRing now offered free webspace. This was good timing indeed! However, I still had a big problem: how long (and how much energy) was it going to take to get all the internal links, including that now-even-more-immense index, revised on over 170 pages?
Back in the early days of AOL's offering FTP service, I had found a program called Hot Dog Pro, which I no longer have. After a short time I no longer needed the program, as through it and other means, I taught myself to write HTML in notepad. It did have one fabulous feature that I missed: batch find and replace. I now desperately needed such a feature. I searched the web until I found one, free of course, and it worked! (It's called "Replace in Files," in case you need it.)
In a single move, I changed www.usapages.com to sh1.webring.com/people/wg (naturally the http:// stayed the same, and both the directory -- /genessa -- and the individual file names were unchanged). Furthermore, WebRing's webspace allowed a batch upload.
I had my entire 170+ page (and counting!) website corrected, uploaded and functional in less than an afternoon! What took the longest was changing the registered URLs (again), and that really didn't take so very long; I completed that in the same afternoon.
Third time lucky, then? You bet! I am assured by people in the know that WebRing's webspace isn't going anywhere. I'm not, either. I'm in it for the long haul (it's already BEEN a long haul, but I expect it to get much longer).
WebRing saved my butt... and my website!
To learn more about your free webspace, click here.
Thanks to WebRing member genessa for submitting this article! For her contribution, she earned 500 AP. Do you have a success story you would like to share? Contact our editor, Kyle, at kyle ((at)) webring ((dot)) com.
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