Preserving My Web History

Back at the dawn of the Internet I had a GeoCities Web Page. For its time, it was marvelous. All you had to do to keep up with the terms of service was to make sure each page had a link to the GeoCities home page, and upload files through a somewhat clunky web interface.

I haven't touched the thing since about 1997, but it's still up on the web.

Not for long, unfortunately. Yahoo, which bought the place in 1999, is boarding up the site sometime this fall.

So, for posterity, I've downloaded my contribution to early web culture and uploaded it to my current free web site. That I was able to do this tells you something about why GeoCities is about to go the way of Thylacinus cynocephalus: AwardSpace gives me free web space so long as I register my domain with them, with minimal restrictions, and I can manage it with standard ftp. All I have to do is remember to keep my domain registration active.

Looking back on the thing, the only part that might still be relevant are my book reviews, most of which I did as a paid-for-connect-time science advisor for GEnie. They aren't particularly dated, but I obviously needed an editor to go over them. I've also mis-remembered some of the reviews. For example, I was certain that my review of The Curse of the Bambino started with the line Red Sox fans whine a lot, but that turns out not to be the case. (And, the curse having been obliterated, this is the most dated of the reviews.)

Anyway, it's a new home for old web pages, at least until AwardSpace disappears, hopefully in the far, far future.

The Science Hodgepodge Archival Edition

Technical Difficulties

Those of you who occasionally look at my web space www.rcjhawk.us, will find that my domain has been replaced by another. That's because my provider, awardspace.com, neglected to tell me that the domain registration expired until a full two weeks after it actually expired. I've re-registered, hopefully the everything will be back to normal in a day or two.

Actually, it took about an hour. Everything is back in place.

New Home on the Web

I've pretty much completed the move of my files from my defunct Comcast account* to my new, mostly free† domain, www.rcjhawk.us. Links in the sidebar that pointed to Comcast now point to the new domain. I've changed all the links in the body of the blog that I've found, but there may be some I've missed. If you find one, please email.

Letting Awardspace host my account for free puts a few quirks into the system that I didn't expect. They aren't too onerous, but if you're tempted to sign up with them, don't say I didn't warn you:

• First, they wanted to call me up and have a conversation before they'd unlock the website. I expected they would try to set me up with one of their higher-price services, but they didn't. In fact, the conversation was quite pleasant. I guess they just wanted to be sure that I wasn't a spam-bot.
• You can use ftp to transfer files, but you need to be in passive mode. The easiest way to do this from the command line is to invoke the ftp client with:
  $ pftp
  Also, they timeout after 60 seconds, which is annoying, because:
• You never know whether or not your web page is going to display until you test it. Awardspace has a list of “forbidden words,” which are, of course, unposted. If your file doesn't pass the guidelines then trying to view it takes you to the Awardspace homepage. (It also gives you a 403 error, but you don't see that unless you use a browser such as lynx.) Looking at their forums I see that p o r n is forbidden. OK, I see the point. It's a free web account, and the company doesn't want to get into trouble. But why do they censor something like a link to
  
  Google Mail (http://gmail.google.com)?
  
  Yeah, it's not technically the correct site, but it redirects to a rather well-known address.
  
  And it similarly rejects
  
  http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/159327064X/qid=1134831000/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/104-0433773-2563904?s=books&v=glance&n=283155, which is a link to the book Just Say No to Microsoft.
  
  What's really annoying is that they don't tell you what part of your page is offensive, you have to do a bunch of trial uploads to find it yourself.
• Oh, yes, they also block mp3 files. Even innocent ones. Well, again I can see why, but ten-second or less snippets shouldn't bother anyone, and, as you can see, they allow the sounds in ogg format.
• If I were a conspiracy theorist I could give you a hundred reasons for this behavior. However, I realize that they're giving me the web-space for free. If I wanted to remove the limitations, I could pay for the site. Even their $5/month plan has fewer restrictions, and I could use scp to copy files over. But at the moment I don't need that, and $60/year buys a half-dozen paperbacks. So I'll put up with it, at least for now.

So would I recommend Awardspace to anyone else? Well, for now it works for me. Next month it might not. I'll keep you up to date, but in any case your mileage may vary.

* You had to try it, didn't you?

† $19.95 per year for the domain registration, “but wait — there's more!”