Moving from the Old Site
27/11/21
Yes, it's the second coming of the blog, for those tired of creaky websites and also of social media. Today I registered solitaryreview.com and .co.uk, and they point to the write.as blog.
My old website is now defunct. Newer cafe reviews and a couple of other pieces have been uploaded – the older cafe reviews are now on Flickr. As to the rest, it also exists on my PC and in the Cloud and is no longer needed online. It’s a shame in a way as there’s nothing ‘wrong’ with Typepad as such: it’s straightforward to use (rather what Wordpress was ten years ago when I was using it more), but when a company won’t even allow new sign-ups and directs prospective users to a sister company using a rival technology, then it is probably time to call it a day. (tl;dr: even Typepad’s owners want you to use Wordpress). And I also don’t need the huge number of pages and posts on there to still be online.
I’ve had a website of some kind for several years, probably since 2000 – there is a very early homepage that says ‘revised September 2001’ and has a SFF.net logo so it will have been hosted there. At the time (2000-2001), I also did work for local sites such as the Fulham and Hammersmith Historical Society (still going but I handed it over to them), H&F Local Agenda 21, Cycick (cycle repair company), H&F Pedestrians Association, and Haughton and Naughten (costume designers). Much of the ‘my site’ pages on my PC date from the mid-2000s, including a vehicle list from 2004 and the pubs of H&F survey (2002-03). The precursor to the pubs list shows dated updates from 2002 and 2003. It also references walkingspace.org, a domain I owned at the time but which is now owned by a walking tours company. There is a page on it for Horncastle School (i.e. not a separate site); this also links to the Yahoogroups mailing list. There is also a list of domains I owned, which contains:
fhhs.co.uk, fhhs.org.uk, fh-pubs.org.uk, chrisamies.com, deadground.com, chrisamies.co.uk, haf21.org.uk, hfla21.org.uk, horncastleschool.co.uk, last-orders.com
At one point I had something called Bathos, on the NTLWorld server, which appears to have been a link page to my other pages. (Pubs list, FHHS, Horncastle, Pictures for SPPHRE whatever that is).
In Autumn 2005 I declared the intention to move to a blog-based solution, which I said would be Livejournal and for a while was (finally leaving LJ on 19/01/2018, although I didn’t use it much after around 2015).
At the time I still used FTP for the FHHS and Horncastle sites and also for a separate website for the Hammersmith and Fulham pubs list. I said I was going to move to blogs in 2005; but the Wordpress account dates from nearly four years later, so did I not have a website for four years? I’m not sure, but it seems likely that either I didn’t, or I did but just let it be and didn’t do anything with it. In the same piece I also noted moving images to Flickr, which in terms of the pub list did happen. Years later I’ve followed it with the earlier (i.e. pre-Cheltenham) cafe reviews.
Wordpress: joined June 2009. Personal website will have been there from 6/2009 until 3/2014 (4 years 9 months). I don’t think I’ve ever paid for Wordpress, but they may yet make it a paid-only service in which case I will either need to pay for hosting for the Horncastle School site (the most likely outcome) or move it elsewhere. The earliest page date for that site on WP is 15/06/2010. During that era I also designed WP sites for Martinworks (handyman), The Spirits Authority (experts in whisky etc.), the Fairfield Tavern (not used), and The Silver Wizard Project (rock band, sadly split up before releasing their first album or the website).
The Solitary Review: Typepad website 16/03/2014 to 28/11/2021 (7 years 8 months).
3/12/2010 is the date on the earliest article, which references my Nanowrimo work, Brothers of the Shadow.This will have been a page ported from my Wordpress site.
Charge has always been US$8.95 per month, so at least there were no unwelcome increases.
Wordpress was an idea but has become too complicated for my needs. Too big and powerful, the real sledgehammer cracking a nut, and din you with prompts to take out a subscription when you go there to tend to your free sites. The Horncastle school site is still on there but belongs to an earlier era (2010) when it was simpler. Easily.com host its domain and so I will need to do something about that when it is time, although the Horncastle site has probably reached everyone it was going to reach so it isn’t important and I don’t need to do anything like buy a parallel domain name e.g. horncastleschool.org (which is available). More importantly, Easily also host the FHHS domain. As it is referenced by external links, the domain needs to keep existing.