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A New Era For My Websites

5 years ago870 words

I've reorganised the many websites I own, most of which were already long dead. Some are gone and probably won't return, others might return as archives or new versions. I don't know for sure yet, but here are my thoughts at the moment.

My websites went down a few days ago due to what I suspect was a technical fault (though of course I went through a whole lot of stress and anxiety worrying that it might have been malicious, as I've had to deal with hacks and attacks in the past). It's taken a while to get them back up, but that's largely because I've been using this opportunity to shuffle around a lot of things behind the scenes, which I've been meaning to do for a long while.

I've been making websites since my mid-teens, a decade and a half ago, and in that time I've started way too many different community sites, only to abandon them for various reasons not long afterwards. The file structure of my site was clogged up with all these old, dead projects, and it's been quite refreshing clearing them all out. It's almost as if I'm starting with a fresh slate. I pretty much rebuilt this blog almost from scratch, which feels nice (though I retained the database of old posts, and the Disqus comments are stored on their server anyway).

I made my site in raw code that I learned like 15 years ago, and during the technical fault, it began to register as obsolete, producing warnings that cluttered up pages. I've had to learn some new, better ways of handling these bits of code, which isn't a bad thing. Things are a lot neater now, behind the scenes.

But I'm also aware that I've effectively removed many years' worth of created content from the internet, and I wonder how many people would be upset by something that was meaningful to them being lost.

So if I have removed something that you wish I hadn't, let me know, either on this post or in an email or something.

The two most important sites I had, and which are currently gone, are Fig Hunter and, to a lesser degree, Alora Fane. It's unlikely that I'll be restoring them to their formerly operational states. I looked at them, and it seems that some people did visit and post occasionally long after their abandonment, but not enough to warrant the difficulties of maintaining them.

What I might do instead is create a 'museum' part of my site to host frozen copies of these websites, so then they can be viewed but not posted on. But that's challenging, because of the issues with the obsolete code. I'd effectively have to recode large parts of them, and I don't have the time to focus on something so difficult which would have so little payoff.

Previously, my primary domain was fighunter.com, but I've switched it now to alorafane.com. This doesn't really mean anything to viewers, it's mostly a technical behind-the-scenes switch, but I've done it because I intend to revive Alora Fane in some form. I've been getting back into making games that I'm setting in that world, and I'll use it to host them if nothing else.

I'm unsure whether or not to run another community. It's caused me a whole lot of psychological trauma in the past because my weird mind handled managing many other minds so badly, but I've learned and grown a lot since then, so maybe it'd be different were I to try again. I don't know. I've been using Disqus for comments on this blog, but people have been abusing anonymity on that recently anyway so it's not exactly much better.

If I did create community features, I'd make it so that you'd create, say, an 'Alora Fane account', which would be able to comment there and on here, and on any other websites that I might set up (though ideally I won't set up a bunch of others; I feel I've outgrown that stage of my development now anyway). I'm thinking about whether or not to do that.

Another thought is that I could set up Alora Fane and Fig Hunter similarly in terms of layout (they'd look pretty much like this blog does now, but the bit at the top would be blue and purple respectively), with Alora Fane hosting/describing games specific to that world and Fig Hunter for my old Flash games. Again, I'm thinking about what to do.

I have mixed feelings about all this, and I didn't exactly intend to do any of it this way. But perhaps it's the beginning of a new era in my life as a creative internet person, we'll see.

And like I said, if you have any requests or issues with any of this, anything you'd want restored, I'm interested to hear your thoughts. I've mostly been making this up as I go along after that technical issue was thrust upon me, and I feel there's still a lot left to do before I can feel settled about it all.

(Oh, and I've made like half a dozen backups, so nothing's permanently gone. It's just not available online.)