18 April 2023 @ 01:23 am
Vanishing websites  
About a month ago, my website mysteriously disappeared. Along with all the rest of the Forever Knight Website Archive, including three main FK fic archives, most War archives and faction sites, sundry personal sites saved from GeoCities and Fortune City, and so on and so forth.

My first reaction was to e-mail Stephanie Kellerman, who had been hosting the Website Archive on her site, www.foreverknight.org. The e-mail bounced. I posted to the FORKNI-L mailing list (on which Steph had been active last fall). No response—well, except for concern and sympathy from other FK fans. I then googled and found an obituary.

Whether the Stephanie Kellerman who died is our Steph Kellerman from FK fandom is something I have no way of knowing. That's one of the difficulties with fannish friendships. You may not actually know the person's RL name; and, even if you do, you probably don't have a street address for them. However, the obituary included the usual little bio, which said the deceased knew computers and had four grandchildren—and, although my correspondence with Steph had been mainly about the Website Archive, things did occasionally get mentioned round the edges (so to speak); and it fits.

Anyway, I do plan to put my website up somewhere in the near future on some webhosting service yet to be decided. At the moment, I'm doing some revisions here and there; so it will probably be a few weeks.

When I do, I want to get a large enough site to be able to rehost the other things that have gone. As I did a lot of the collecting and editing of the old GeoCities sites, I have back-ups. I even, in a fit of concern, went page by page through the big fanfic archive copying absolutely everything (I hope!); so that's not lost either.

It'll take time to put everything back up; and, when I do, there'll be a new domain name since Steph's "www.foreverknight.org" has apparently been paid for until 2026, and I'm certainly not going to wait until then! It will all mean an appalling lot of editing in various wikis; but c'est la vie, I suppose, if one finds oneself called to be an archivist.

 
 
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greerwatson[personal profile] greerwatson on April 19th, 2023 03:16 am (UTC)
WordPress is not a webhosting service. It's just a fancy sort of sitebuilder software.
kizzykat[personal profile] kizzykat on April 19th, 2023 09:42 am (UTC)
Wordpress offers software to build your own website. It also offers free hosting with templates for your own site, with a relevant domain name. You can also purchase additional storage, plus you can buy your own domain name. It is worth a look.
greerwatson[personal profile] greerwatson on April 20th, 2023 01:39 am (UTC)
Yes, I appreciate that WordPress has site builder software and will then host your site. I think you may be missing the point that I already have a site, one that I wrote myself. I therefore don't need their software or their templates. As for a domain name: yes, I'll need to get one. However, most webhosts offer that as part of the package.