Friday, October 31, 2008

goodbye AOL --

Well, AOL stuck to their word.   "Hometown.aol.com" and "members.aol.com" -- the FTP sites that hosted AOL member webpages -- are now down and will not be revived.  Thus, the SR Class of 1979 website has officially moved over to the homepage.mac.com location.  

Sad that this has happened so suddenly as I am sure a lot of folks will not find the new location for a long time.


Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Updating

It turns out that changing the address from aol.com to mac.com is just a small aspect of the transition to a new location.  As I look at all of the webpages associated with the main site, I see so many links to images or pages hosted on aol.com.  After 10/31, those links will be dead, so guess what?  I get to crawl through all of the code and search and replace all the aol.com references.  (At least it's done with the "search and replace" function on Dreamweaver.)

My kids and family  have already been neglected this last week as I have had to hurriedly make this move from AOL's servers.  So, if you find some dead links or graphics that won't load, please leave me a comment and I will fix it.

Thanks...


Saturday, October 25, 2008

Working on the website

Given that the SR '79 website is almost 10 years old, it goes without saying that the page is looking a little tired.  Whatever HTML skills I have were all learned on the fly in 1998 and 1999.  Sadly, I've not done a whole lot more with websites since then.  Mostly just using templates.  But I have Dreamweaver, a web authoring application, so I've been trying to clean up the old web page a bit, as I prepare it for its new home over at mac.com.

I only created the page in the first place back in '98 to post all of our high school senior portraits from the yearbook online, since I thought a  lot of us might not have ready access to our yearbooks.  And the web was pretty new and it just seemed that it would be awesome to try to help everyone get psyched to see their old friends from high school.

But I was having fun with the scanner and I found my old Wolf Prints and other such high school memorabilia and just scanned and posted as much as I could. 

One of my favorite aspects of the SR '79 site was the biography page.  It was cool to read about the lives of my classmates.  With the demise of AOL's FTP service, the website will lose the Guestbook function which was what I used to create the Biographies page.  Most of the biographies were written in that first year -- 1999 -- but occasionally someone will drop by and post something from Taipan or some far off place.  Most recently. Spambots ( I guess that's what they are called) had found the site and posted some spam messages that kind of cluttered up the  page a bit.  So, I reluctantly shut that down.  

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Welcome to the new SR '79 blog

With the news that AOL would soon be discontinuing their support for member created webpages, I have been working to transition the members.aol.com/SanRamonHi/classof79.html website to a new address.  Back when I created the site, Bill Clinton had recently been impeached by the House of Representatives  but not yet acquitted by the U.S. Senate.  December 31, 1998.  So, the page lasted 9 years and 10 months at the exact same address.  Shoot, it was only created to help publicize the 20 Year Reunion, held 9 years ago today!  It did it's job, garnering 4,000 hits in its first ten months as we lead up to the 20 year Reunion.  I worked hard at adding content and keeping it fresh that first year.  Since that time, I have allowed the page to remain up and have occasionally added some new content.  By the time AOL shuts the original address down, we'll have gotten over 16,000 visits to the page.

I hope the blog will be a way for communication to take place in a positive manner as we prepare for our 30 Year Reunion!