Look out, World Wide Web, I've decided to come out of seclusion,
and get back on the Net. Kinda in a big way, too. Let me explain--I built a bunch of websites many years ago, all over the Net, mostly on free servers, like this one here at Tripod, and a bunch elsewhere. But then I took almost three years off of the Internet. Wow. Having first learned FORTRAN in 1974, and slung a lotta code in my life, I guess I needed a break. (You may need a short one yourself, what time is it, anyway? ;-)
A lot of things have happened during that time, too much to write here. Suffice it to say that I've recently moved to Austin, Texas, and as a consequence decided to get another 'puter and the Net back. During the first couple of days, I surfed around finding most of my old sites still up and running. I was even able to get my old Yahoo! email address reactivated, so it was all a pleasant surprise. Both in that the various free server companies had left my sites up without a webmaster logging in for almost three years (Thank you, Tripod!), and also that the sites were mostly all working. At least all my scripting and such, though a few links to external sites had been broken because they've moved or quit.
While I was checking up on these sites, I was only checking operability. Because they're all free sites, most don't give much (or any) log access or visitor data. So I wasn't really checking on traffic. I'd mostly built these sites in order to have a playbox in which to perfect the craft that I actually plied elsewhere in the performance of my day job. So I'd never really been out to grab a bunch of traffic with these sites. But one of my sites, ALLnews, I built not long after leaving New York after 9-11. I'd put a lot of time into it, during which I'd healed some from that day. So for that reason and many others, ALLnews had always been my favorite. It does have an enormous amount of ever-changing content, pulling news feeds from more than 3000 sources world-wide and consolidating them into about 330 categorical channels, with relatively easy navigation. I don't think anyone else does exactly that.
So I happened to find a way to check this site's traffic, just curious and all, and I was very, very pleasantly suprised to learn that ALLnews had been pulling a steadily-growing and now quite large amount of quality traffic for these years that I hadn't even touched or visited the site!
Well, I'd be a fool if I now continued to leave that in place, and not try to harvest that success. So the point of this post is just to let my friends here know what I'm up to: a complete redesign and pending relaunch of ALLnews. I'm recoding everything in PHP and MySQL, which will significantly extend the site's functionality to the user, supporting user customization, news blogging, and a host of new features I'm now brewing up. The new site will come live under a new, dedicated domain name, as well, to make it much easier to remember. I'll not disclose that name here right now, as I've still quite a lot of work to do before launch, (and lunch too, for that matter!) But keep watching this space for news! Peace out.
Steve Piper, 25 July 2007
