Fifteen years ago, give or take a few months, I set up my first live website. For the first five years, I didn’t do much with it, setting up a few pages about the Titanic movie (!) and a couple road odds-and-ends but not much else.<\/p>\n
In November 2001, I set up Iowa Highway Ends there, and in short order it became large enough that I exceeded the 20 MB (!) limit and needed a second sub-site. Soon, I had to start storing photos on my iDisk, requiring a manual re-edit of many pages to create absolute links.<\/p>\n
A few years ago, I decided to move everything exclusively to my iDisk, after Angelfire’s interface failed to change. It was more efficient.<\/p>\n
But then, last year, Apple lowered the boom. Join iCloud!<\/em> Apple says. Except there’s one problem \u2014 probably because now that everyone uses templates or third-party sites (or, sigh, Facebook) to hold all their pictures and do their page work for them, Apple decided against a web-hosting service.<\/p>\n So ninety days from now, everything at homepage.mac.com\/jeffmorrison \u2014 more than a decade’s worth of stuff \u2014 disappears forever. It might be the biggest purge of the Internet since Yahoo closed Geocities.<\/p>\n That’s why this website was created.<\/p>\n I think I’ve moved everything, and notified everyone I can think of, but there’s only one way to be sure. That’s where the self-imposed “link rot” comes in. The Angelfire pages have remained up, but the accumulation of minor edits to all of them have resulted in un-updated, or worse inaccurate, information.<\/p>\n So today I took a big step. I logged in to Angelfire for the first time in a really long time and found a new interface … that I won’t be interfacing much with. And, in the sub-site, I batch-deleted file after file, files that took untold hours to upload but seconds to go away.<\/p>\n I’m already having second thoughts, but it is one of those things that should be done. In a week or two I’ll go in and delete a chunk again, and hope that everyone who gets a 404 will be able to point to this place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fifteen years ago, give or take a few months, I set up my first live website. For the first five years, I didn’t do much with it, setting up a few pages about the Titanic movie (!) and a couple … Continue reading