Thud! Goes the Other Shoe

Goodbye to my first web address ever

AOL Hometown/FTP is closing October 31, 2008
From:	AOLMemberInfo
To:	that word again @aol.com
Date:	Tue, 30 Sep 2008 8:33 pm

Dear AOL Hometown/FTP user,

We’re sorry to inform you that on Oct. 31, 2008, AOL® Hometown and FTP will be shut down permanently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Though you will be able to modify your Hometown site and access FTP until this date, we urge you to save your AOL Hometown/FTP content immediately, and consider other options for hosting your site. Read more about how to download and save your Hometown/FTP files here.

In the meantime, please bookmark the People Connection Blog, where you can find out more about AOL Hometown/FTP. You can also subscribe to the People Connection Blog RSS feed to stay informed about any changes. We’ll be updating the People Connection Blog often, so please check it regularly.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we make this transition. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

Sincerely,

The AOL Hometown Team

A caveat to those who need to download files before it's too late. Do NOT follow the directions referenced above. The old FTP client wants to convert all your gifs (maybe jpgs, too; I'm not sure) to bmps. Also the system is overloaded, and the little window doesn't list all files at once. Instead, go in through http://hometown.aol.com/_fm/mt.ssp?a=b from inside the AOL software, or use an external FTP client if you have one handy.

As for myself, I moved most of my pages to mavarin.com some time ago, but I'm taking no chances. I downloaded every file from every screen name tonight. While I was at it, I deleted two screen names, and subscribed to a mailing list from Yahoo/mavarin.com instead of my old UWoT screen name. I plan to shut down the latter at the end of October, the same time the other stuff goes offline.

This was the club's official home page - a hundred years ago.

My very first web page was on AOL, way back in 1995 or 1996. For a decade my Madeleine L'Engle bibliography was there, along with some neglected Quantum Leap stuff. But it's been a long time since that was a good place to host a web page. The URL was long, and each page was loaded with AOL advertising and tracking code. So tonight I cleaned up all that code from the QL pages, made some other updates and improvements, and uploaded them to mavarin.com. And I put stripped down versions of a few pages back onto AOL with the new URL at the top. May as well let people know where those pages went - until AOL deletes even that.

AOL has been largely irrelevant for quite some time now. But it's still very sad.


Karen