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Snapshot from 2001 version |
stewartville.net has been our "domain" and home to our personal/family web site for about 10 years now. It started out as a few pages of hand-coded HTML that I'd ftp to our default web space available from our very first broadband connection. Then I got all snazzy (took a couple classes) and started hosting it from our own iMac.
However, when we moved back to Iowa in '04 we were living in temporary quarters for a while so I had signed up for web hosting via Dreamhost.com and transferred our site there. I started using WordPress software for the "blog" part of it and Gallery software for the photo part of it. I never really blogged over there all that much. Maybe once a month I'd post something about family activities with links to the photo gallery for visuals. It was mostly a spot for family members to view pictures of the boys as they grew up. An online photo album with occasional newsy type info.
I feel like personal/family web sites are relics of a bygone era. At one time that was the only way to have a "profile" online, there really was no social networking other than within web communities and forums, etc. When I created our site in 2000 I was in no way a pioneer, there were many personal sites out there already... but within our family & friends, we were pretty much the only ones with a web site, so it was kind of cool. I was proud of having built it myself from scratch and installing all the little scripts and stuff. But in the last few years it has become more of an "oh that" skillset/hobby that fell to the wayside. I mean I still enjoy getting all geeky and ssh-ing into our webhost and running command line magic and stuff, but it is more of a hassle now.
In the last few years I'd really slowed down updating it and every time it came around to renew the web hosting I'd weigh the pros and cons. This time not only are we faced with a more strict budget, but there has also been some annoying stuff going on related to the site. Last month I had to troubleshoot why the photo gallery suddenly stopped showing any pictures, and ended up just installing a new gallery to populate with the old data. Around the same time and even recently it appeared that the site had been "compromised" and/or fallen victim to a "hacking" or "phishing" or whatever it is that installs "malicious code" or "exploits" within the apparently unsecure blog/gallery scripts. The exploits try to redirect visitors to jacked up sites. Sorry to all 2 or 3 of you who had visited there recently and might have ended up getting "security warning" pop-up windows. I tried fixing it but eventually was just like, this is futile and annoying and not worth worrying about.
It is time to renew again and now it really seems like overkill to pay $120 a year for web hosting. We were only using a fraction of the space and services paid for. Especially silly when everything we've done there over the years can pretty much be done almost for free (& easier) nowadays with blogs and photo sharing sites, and facebook, etc. So I won't be renewing the web hosting and I've already redirected the domain name to this
blogger page. I suppose I could have exported the old blog posts to import to the new spot but oh well. I've got the photo gallery backed up locally and will at some point will try to get all the photos (or at least the boys') back online, maybe to flickr.com or picasa (web albums for blogger). However I do sometimes wonder/worry about skeevy pervs out there who might be doing good knows what while looking at our family photos. Plus now that I've been reading the
Millennium series featuring genius hacker Lizbeth Salander, who can find out almost anything about anybody, especially if they have an online presence-- I feel like deleting everything and changing all our passwords.
