Southern Muse: the Prospect of Moving a Site

Now it might seem, in my posting about Marissa Mayer and Yahoo, that I had some driving interest in keeping up with the CEOs of Silicon Valley. Although I sometimes recognize their names when I hear them, I couldn't tell you which is which, usually. I have to do a quick look-up to make sure that Steve Jobs and Apple are practically synonymous and that there was another Steve, too (Wozniak). Bill Gates/Microsoft ~ that one, I can remember (though often with distaste). Don't get me wrong ~ it's interesting. I just don't keep up. My only reason for searching Mayer was the most selfish motive of all: Will Yahoo, as we know it, continue to exist? Will they keep Y! webhosting alive, or will it go the way of GeoCities? Will I have to move Southern Muse? See, I told you it was selfish. Now, I probably don't have three faithful readers at Southern Muse. Even my old friends and family sometimes say, "Oh, you have a website?!" (This after ten-plus years). Well, maybe I exaggerate. Most of my family are familiar with my site. But I try not to SPAM people about it. Sure, I have a few readers ~ or, at least a handful of people who hit the surface and bounce off like a flat rock skipping across a pond. So, why I insist upon keeping the site, and worry about maybe having to move it ~ go figure. I've invested some years and some dollars in creating it and maintaining it. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. It's the hobby (or vice) that took over my life, to the detriment of all other hobbies and passions. Ever a challenge, it still needs work. But, for what it's worth, I am proud of it, and I do want to keep it. With luck and prayer, I can keep it at Yahoo. I'd sure hate to have to move it. The idea of it makes me shudder...

A Fearful Geek Looks Under the Hood...

Flash back to the year 2000. Then, I was agonizing over whether to take the plunge and invest in my own domain name. Looking back, "invest" is a poor choice of words. "Splurge" might be a better one. Buy a gold brick. But "invest" I did, and for twelve years now, have been the proud owner of an obscure little site that struggles as I do. Southern Muse is now filled with a big pile of pages, interconnected in a fairly disorganized way. My idea for Southern Muse was way too broad for a first web site, or almost for any website. Some of the subsections would do well to have their own site. So, twelve years later, in an effort to divide and conquer, I found myself in the same position: agonizing over whether to buy a domain. And yes, I bit the bullet. I bought one. Not one, but several. And (sigh) much to my regret, I find that the industry of domain registration hasn't changed that much. Oh, the Web has changed. It boggles the mind to see how far web design, blogging tools, CSS, Flash, scripts, and all the other things have come. But the world of domain-name registration is as horrifying as it ever was. It seems a fraudulent, deceitful industry. Registrars have learned the art of selling, there's no doubt about that. Their front pages cover a full range: begging, pleading, boasting, arm-twisting, flirting, and occasionally professional seeming. Ah, but underneath that front page! Horrors. All roads lead to Hell. Professional? Sweetie, you haven't found out what products and services weren't included in that deceitful oversell. You haven't tried to dial that much-touted but non-existent 24/7 support hotline. Cheap? Ha ha ha! Don't be delusional. Shopping carts are for filling. Yours will quickly fill up with add-ons you hadn't thought necessary, but suddenly realize the scary implications of not buying them. Easy. My dear. Have you gotten a look at cPanel? Domain registration, transfer, and web hosting, my friend... those devices were devised purely to inflict torture. They are still housed in the swampy, stagnant, backwaters of some Tim Burton-cum-Steven Kingish sci-fi nightmare. We never should've let the Web be created by children who grew up reading Swamp Thing.

Another Logo

Naturally, a new web site needed a logo. I was ready for it this time. I'd navigated the learning curve of image technology by cutting my teeth on Bugbones, the little cartoon guy. Southern Muse needed a more serious logo. But I'd been reading up. Banners were the thing. The Web gods had decreed that 468 x 60 pixels was the ideal size for banners (perfect, back then, for the 8" screen). Might as well go that route, they said, 'cause sooner or later you'll want to swap banners with somebody. So I did. And Webmonkey had taught me to do the Gif thing. In playing around with one of my art programs, I'd developed a little flower that turned out surprisingly nice and compact. With a little tweaking and a periwinkle-blue border, that made a nice logo. Also it would be quick, and I was already tiring of making logos for pages that had no content. Might wanna get some content. Just a thought...


The Annals of Southern Muse

Chicken, Egg, or Southern Muse?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? It's a little fuzzy to me as to whether I bought the Southern Muse domain before I found out about the About.com name thing, or after. Miningco had changed to About, Inc. in May of 1999, according to Wikipedia.* I purchased my domain on February 1, 2000. Clearly, About.com was first, but that doesn't mean that I had heard of it back then. Even if Philip had talked to me before I picked out SouthernMuse, I probably wouldn’t have let go of the name. I was already emotionally attached to it by then. At some point, I know that I did begin to think of domain names beginning with “A.” Was I really thinking of buying more domains? If so, avarice was at the heart of it. Tech forums were buzzing with talk about the importance of top placement in search engines, and any time the term SEO popped up, it was accompanied by excited gossip about the possibility of making gazillions of dollars. Big money aside, I would be happy to have my domain pay for itself. When I tested my own placement by performing searches I found that Southern Muse was not exactly at the top of the heap. In searches for "art," or "genealogy," Southern Muse came up about 5,999,999 in the results. I wasn't on page one ~ I wasn't even on 101. How would anybody ever find me?


*"About.com." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. 16 Dec 2008, 05:07 UTC. 24 Dec 2008  
URI: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=About.com&oldid=258295629

What, alphabetical?!

Sigh. It seems that, before I had even bought my domain name, the rest of the world was already clued in on a fact that I hadn’t dreamed of: that there’s more to picking a great domain name than just having a name that sounds nice. It's got to be alphabetical.  Apparently, alphabetical placement plays a part in the proper selection of a name.  Somewhere between the time that I bought SouthernMuse.com and the time that I had to migrate to a new host,* Philip, formerly of MiningCo and now of About.com, told me about the importance of having a domain name that began with "A," or another letter close to the top of the alphabet. Some search engines listed results alphabetically, he said. What a let-down!


*Host migration: yeah, I suffered that indignity, to be discussed later…

The Annals of Southern Muse

HTML Worries

I must've been feeling pretty cocky when I bought Southern Muse. Just what, in my Angelfire and FTP experience, had led me to believe that I could actually build a site from scratch, without any web-shell tools? Why, little Webmonkey, of course. Angelfire's web shell and directory structure had been difficult to learn and a nightmare to keep up with, but building the pages had been a piece of cake (at least compared to having your feet dipped in hot oil, which was what most of my technology experience had seemed like). Angelfire had provided some simple readymade page layouts (just fill in the links), with blanks for HTML, if you felt so brave and foolhardy ~ and, they gave you the sweet little Webmonkey to tutor you on simple HTML code. I was mighty grateful to that little monkey. He made it seem easy. So easy, in fact, that I now felt like a HTML-writing diva. Thanks to my Angelfire experience, I had learned to upload an image (assuming that I had one) into a directory, and write a bit of HTML code telling the browser to locate and display it. Yeah, by then I knew what a browser was ~ some kind techies among the smartasses on various forums had filled me in.

Now, for all I can recall at this late date, Icom may have had web-shell tools, they may have had some readymade pages. But by then, I was in control-freak mode. Yessir, I wanted a layout with my own personal style. No ads, no banners, no geeky-looking airbrushed jet streams in the background. That's why I'd bought Southern Muse. I wanted it to be me.

The annals of Southern Muse

Attaching a Domain Name to a Site

Why did I buy a domain name, when I didn't even have a site plan? I think I know. Leading up the the year 2000, the 'Net world and those who marketed it convinced us that domain names were just plain gonna run out. Here I had the perfect (I thought) domain name, and if I didn't act fast, somebody was gonna grab it right out from under me! So I bought my domain, and what did I get for my money? A blinding white page with a complimentary, ready-made banner, courtesy of Icom, that said, "Under Construction." If configuring an FTP was scary stuff, looking at a $144 "Under Construction" banner and wondering how to point a domain at it was, frankly, terrifying. Now I had to read up on how to make IP no. 999.999.999.999 (or whatever) say "SouthernMuse.com." Yes, you had to make that happen, it didn't do it automatically. Talk about building from the ground up! Who knew? You see, my IP number was assigned by Icom, my page host. My domain name was parked over on another block, at Network Solutions. I was standing in line behind a lot of other HTML dummies, hoping my domain wouldn't be towed. I have no idea whether it would've been as difficult if I'd used the same entity as host and registrar. Too late to look back, and there was no way I would've paid Network Solution's outlandish hosting fees (being now, as I was, expert enough to be bossy). Anyhow...  somehow, I managed to point SouthernMuse.com to my blank page. After the usual depressing delay that comes with all server-fed things (two, three days?), my address finally read, "SouthernMuse.com." I had an URL! And a blank-white page. I was very proud.


The Annals of Southern Muse

Southern Muse registered on Feb. 21, 2000

Now I had my host, but I still needed to register my domain name. I'm a firm believer in getting a thing straight from the horse's mouth, going back to the source. This convoluted reasoning led me to buy my domain name from Network Solutions, "the dot-com people." If nothing else, I figured if N.S. was InterNIC, they must be the authoritative source on InterNIC fees. Nowhere did their terms and conditions mention InterNIC fees (though they were the people who collected them.) Finally there was nothing left to do but take a chance ~ InterNIC fees be damned. Having already chosen my host, Icom, I registered my domain name, southernmuse.com, at Network Solutions on February 21, 2000. I had my dot-com!


The annals of Southern Muse

Dot-Com: The Real Thing

Tonight on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, one of the questions referenced the 2007 domain-name dispute over the website, keithurban.com. In that suit, Keith Urban, the Australian country singer/artist sued Keith Urban, a New Jersey artist/painter, over the domain name. It seems that the artist had registered his dot-com long before the musician became famous in the U.S. Although the musician claimed that the painter was trying to misrepresent himself, the painter did not claim to be a musician, did not use photographs of the musician, did not sell music. There seemed to be no cause for confusion, except that both men shared the same name. Certainly, in my opinion, the musician didn't have a leg to stand on, and I hoped that the law saw it the same way. I was curious to see how the case came out. I decided to Google-search the final decision, but could not find it (though I found multiple references to the original case and a followup countersuit). Finally, it occurred to me just to visit the website and see whether it touted art or music. As of June 29, 2010, it still belongs to the painter, Keith Urban ~ not the musician. As a matter of fact, the lawsuit has probably brought the painter some success. The current site design is more professional and polished than the original site. It is obvious at first glance that the site belongs to an artist. It's not even necessary to read the text. The lack of any reference to a legal conclusion of this case makes me think that it might still be in arbitration. Or maybe no reporter ever dug deeper than the original AP release. Obviously, I hope that the website remains as it is: registered to the painter, Keith Urban of New Jersey. Keith Urban, the musician, simply lost out. I guess he should've claimed fame before 1999 (when the dot-com was registered). It all goes to show how important the choice of a domain name can be.

Bought and Paid For

So, now I was the proud owner of a web site. Not a free website, this time, but one that was bought and paid for, with real money ~ not that Monopoly stuff. I think the true horror of what I'd done dawned on me as soon as the cash left my bank account. In for a penny, in for a pound, as they say. I'd just forked over a week's pay, and for what? A blank, no-name website that I myself was going to have to build... brick by brick (or bracket by bracket, as the case may be). Talk about Frankenstein! Bugbones, indeed. I barely knew how to put two angle brackets together. And now I had a new dilemma... should I stick with my odd name? I loved my little Bugbones cartoon guy... but was he truly representative of me? Did I want him buzzing about my serious art? This was going to be my real site, my one true dot-com. I hadn't even bought my name yet, and here I had a web site, just wasting away. So much for fear of technology... my technological clock was ticking!

Choosing a Host: Let's Get Cheap

I know why I avoided Network Solutions' hosting: the price. I have no idea why I chose to bypass OCS, my local ISP, and go after another host. Perhaps OCS wouldn't let me have my own domain on their free hosting plan. Perhaps they were already having business problems by then. OCS aside, I know exactly why I picked Icom. They were the cheapest package I found that published their ad in English. There may have been one cheaper, but it had the look of a man standing on a street corner in a trenchcoat. Wanna buy a watch? It's cheap. So... on February 19th, 2000, I signed up with Icom. It was to cost $49 for setup and $99 per year in hosting fees. Not long later, they sent me my temporary URL. I was now the proud owner of a site that said, "Under Construction." Now all I had to do was buy my domain name and point it. Icom sent me instructions on how to do this. These were something like stereo instructions (shades of Beetlejuice).

Network Solutions: The Dot-Com People

In searching InterNIC, all roads led to Rome, or in this case, to Network Solutions. Network Solutions billed themselves as "the dot-com people." Apparently whatever InterNIC was, it was owned or controlled by Network Solutions, and any fee that I would have to pay must go into their coffers. If Network Solutions' hosting package was any indication of what InterNIC fees would be, I was in for an expensive ride. Their hosting package was about $300 a year, as I recall. Maybe more. And they didn't speak of web space in terms of megabytes or gigabytes, but of pages. For $300 you got a page. If you needed more pages, you bought more. A one-page site for 300 bucks. That's the way I read it. And here I was used to Angelfire, where you could have as many pages as you could build. I could tell by their terms that hosting was one thing and registration was another. I still don't know if my perception about Network Solutions' hosting package was wrong. Maybe by "page" they meant "site." Even so, their package was high.

Who is InterNIC?

I had pretty well decided to have my dot-com, but now came the struggle to understand just what that entailed. There were several entities involved in domain purchase and maintenance, and the services each one offered weren't clear to me. One odd sticking point was "InterNIC fees." No matter who you chose as a registrar, and where you decided to park... no matter who hosted your page... YOU, the domain owner (said the fine print), were responsible for InterNIC fees. Who or what was InterNIC? And how much were these mysterious fees? No-one knew. I tore up the keyboard searching the 'Net for "InterNIC." The more I searched, the less I found ~ and the more confused I became. InterNIC fees began to loom as the strange, unknown quantity. Would these fees break me? Were we talking a dollar a year or fifty dollars a month? With Internet, it could be anything. There just wasn't any frame of reference. Common sense finally prevailed, and I decided that the "fee" was probably a nominal amount, like a tax.

FTP Configuration Headaches

FTP. If I was going to have to start all over learning something, it might as well be some software of my own. I read everything I could find on FTP and thought I could learn it. So, I bought CuteFTP. I had no domain ~ but I had FTP.

Cute FTP was supposed to be easy. And it probably was, relatively speaking. I had no other FTP to compare it to, unless you count those on-line uploaders provided by Angelfire and Yahoo; but those didn't have to be configured. I shudder to recall the difficulty I had configuring Cute FTP. I don't think it was the fault of the software. Their help manual was thorough, but confusing to me. I had some fear of technology, and for good reason. I never really know what I'm doing when I try to configure things. Wizards ask questions, present choices. If I'd never seen the software, how did I know what to answer? If there is no wizard, it's even worse: a dozen drivers, icons, and executable files to unpack and distribute ~ very puzzling. Consequently, at the end of my struggle to configure any software, the machine usually works worse than when I started ~ or doesn't work at all. Asking around doesn't help. When I was configuring CuteFTP, no-one I knew had ever heard of FTP. I muddled my way through, read the manual a dozen times, and went through a blue-jillion trial-and-error steps. Something didn't click. I don't know what was more confusing, the tilde in the username, my host's directory structure, the proper placement of slashes for directories, or the meticulous instructions on filling in IP numbers. Usually in these battles, if my struggle doesn't lead to complete destruction of my PC, it leads to new knowledge, if not expertise. In the FTP battle, I studied other sites' URLs, looked at their slashes and tildes, dug through my ISP's original installation instructions, and read up on IP numbers. I puzzled through manuals, tried what I thought they said, and failed time and time again. Then, with some sudden revelation, the path was clear and I was "in." The old epic writings speak of wailing, moaning, and the gnashing of teeth. I can tell you I did plenty of it. So much trauma! And yet ten years later, I had practically forgotten ever hosting Bugbones at OCS Online and couldn't remember why I'd bought CuteFTP. My file dates and page links show that by February of 2000 ~ maybe even before ~ I had Bugbones the second up and running on OCS. All of this, I did with the idea of getting my own domain.

Topic: The Annals of Southern Muse.
Timeline: Purchased CuteFTP on May 21, 1999

Domains, Registrars, and Hosts

I had spent several months reading up on domains and how to get them. I was confused by the various entities involved in getting a domain. I only had a vague comprehension of the differences between a domain, a registrar, a host, and a server. It mattered, because each separate entity had its own set of fees ~ and how much might those be? Each process also brought its own new set of technical difficulties. I discovered that a domain name was one thing ~ you could "park" it free (whatever that meant). Page hosting was another thing entirely, and no matter how much I read, it seemed that I couldn't get around having to pay a monthly fee for it. Free advice was everywhere to be found, and some of the tutorials stated that your local ISP might give you a free page. I checked into it. Sure enough, OCS, my local Internet Service Provider, did offer a free personal web page. Since I was already paying them for Internet service and the page was "free," I thought that hosting might be included in the monthly fee I was already paying. If so, I would only have to buy a domain name. OCS didn't have FTP, but buying FTP software would still be cheaper than a monthly hosting fee.

At this point, I wasn't even sure that OCS would let me hang a domain name on the free page they gave me. Angelfire advertised that you could turn your free page into a domain at any time ~ for a fee. But what was I buying? The terms were confusing. I knew I'd be paying for space that I now got for free. Oh, Angelfire promised I'd get lots of other cool things that I didn't know I needed ~ wouldn't know what to do with when I got them. But the Angelfire web-shell upgrade had left me in a bind. I could barely log in, much less navigate the new directory. Did I want to pay them for that? I now knew that Angelfire wasn't the only host in town. Cheap hosting was everywhere, for as little as five dollars a month. Nearly all hosts required a one-time set-up fee, ranging from fifteen to seventy dollars. I could manage a one-time flat fee. Registering a domain name would cost about ten dollars. Once you had a domain name, you had to "park" it apparently. I wasn't sure what "parking" entailed. Was it free parking, or would I have to put a quarter in the meter ever few hours? (I thought I knew the answer to that!) What was the difference between registering and parking anyhow?


Transition: Bugbones to Southern Muse.

Reconstructing the Timeline

I can place the dates of some of these events with pretty good accuracy, with the help of Wikipedia, old e-mails, and the invoice paper trail. MiningCo came into being about 1996. My old PC was built by OCS (a local hack) in 1997, but I got it secondhand a few years later. Late in 1998, I'd discovered Yahoo Mail and Angelfire. Sometime that same year came the Art Forum on MiningCo. Perhaps it was already there, but I found it in '98. My short-lived Bugbones Buzz forum on InsideTheWeb.com was in place by January 1999, if not before. Sometime between that little forum and May of 1999, I had scraped up enough to hook up Internet. I was an old hand at email by now, but using the email wizard to configure a local ISP provider's info through Outlook Express was another story. What headaches! (The Perils of Dial-Up Modems and Lost Drivers on Second-Hand Computers will be saved for another post.) Also around May of 1999, MiningCo disappeared and About.com came on the scene.

On May 21, 1999, I bought CuteFTP. I didn't have a domain. When I came across that old receipt, I was puzzled as to why I bought an FTP program before I bought a domain, but it came back to me...

An Aside to the Guide

I was amazed that the guide of the art forum was a southerner, one who had lived in the North Georgia mountains at one time, and had Alabama ties, as well. It isn't important to know a guide's biography, but meeting a friendly face with a familiar story in a sea of tech-talk added a whole new dimension to Internet technology for me. It made the world smaller. So occasionally I e-mailed Philip or sent him an update, and he would do the same. He was perhaps my first on-line human/cyber contact, outside of friends and family. At one time or another, over a several-year period, I corresponded with him and others did too. This was not a case of our taking his forum 'guidance' so personally that we thought we should direct correspondence to him instead of posting on the Forum. It was more in the nature of an 'aside' to the guide. Sometimes a subject might go off topic, so we went outside forum to keep from boring the rest of the crowd. Southern stories, for instance, didn't really belong on Art Forum, but it would be silly to go search out a new forum just to elaborate on a thread or reminisce over old times.

But what started this friendly chit-chatty kind of off-topic conversation was when, early on, I'd made the off-hand remark to Philip, 'Hey, weren't you the same guide who ran an old art forum on MiningCo? I was that person PauperWitch who used to post. We e-mailed once.'

And Philip said (my paraphrase), 'Oh, yeah. I remember. I like your new nickname better.' Because by then I had settled on what would become my true web presence, humble and obscure though that presence may be. I was, by then, Southern Muse.


Topics: Philip the Guide, southern, MiningCo, North Georgia mountains, Annals of Southern Muse.

Technology was Devouring My Life

So now Bugbones was officially a cartoon site, a fun site. That might do do for graphic art, fun and frivolous illustrations, and humor. Bugbones, as barren as it was, had been a lot of work. I could still imagine great things for it. In fact, the doing of a site was now a goal in itself. Maybe it was even an obsession. This World-Wide-Web thing was aptly named. It was a giant web and I was caught up in it. I was a hapless fly. Technology was devouring my life. Here I am, ten years later, still struggling to keep up with technology. But I am not alone. I am one fly of over 108 million.* So, in 1999, with Bugbones barely off of the drawing board, I began to conceive of my "real" site. An art site. Not fun art. My art. But could a tired, frustrated non-techie aspire to having two sites? She thought she could. Barely a glimmer of an idea, this second site. A glimmer of light. And I was a moth to it...

The Perils of Bugbones.
Annals of Southern Muse begin.


*As of 2007, according to Boutell.com, there were over 108 million websites, sporting more than 19.2 billion pages, on the World Wide Web. And growing. No, I am not alone. Reference: "WWW FAQs: How many websites are there?" URI <http://www.boutell.com/newfaq/misc/sizeofweb.html>. Boutell.com. Accessed 30 December 2008.