Developers are Crabgrass : Dale Carnegie; AOL showing why it is a king-sized failure, anguish, and the mysteries of blogging. Backup redux.

Besides being a commentary on the human condition and how NOT to do business, in a way this post is for others. For those whose off-site-from-the-home-computer web-based content is of value. Crabgrass archives are all on the web, out of that league, being just meanderings, complaints, infrequent praise. Still, I'd not like to lose content.

Home machines, we all know we should backup files, we seldom do.

As to web content - Dale Carnegie, seventy years or so ago, wrote his book, "How to Win Friends and Influence People." You can buy a copy for very little, from Amazon.com, although anyone who would loses respect, in my view. It looks to be schlock. Yet people take time over Dale Carnegie, see here and here, and some, as indicated at the dalecarnegie.com website, hope to make some cash flow their way by pitching "partnering," Dale's way, this screenshot:

Some content is better if lost, but that is a digression.

For an eclectic personal reason, I had cause to visit this website, homepage here, and noted at the foot of each page that background, border and button Celtic art was from a linked page - and that gets to the heart of the post. To understand, open either of those last pages and whether you like Celtic art or not, open the link "http://hometown.aol.com/Cyrion7/celtic/index.htm". WOW!

You get routered over to a different link, http://www.peopleconnectionblog.com/2008/11/06/hometown-has-been-shutdown.

A terse post, then a series of pissed-off and anguished comments. Have a look. I see a lesson there, for all of us who blog.

And the photos of trusting people -- AOL subscribers (if any are left trusting AOL after the blogs got torched), are about to further be AOL'ed into the ozone layer of Internet history also, photo-wise, on New Year's Eve, so Happy New Year, if you miss that message and lack home machine backup.

Arguably there was some effort by Kelly Wilson and The AOL Journals Team to give advance notice of blitzing stuff into non-existence [server disabling] but clearly from the earlier link comments, many missed the word and learned of the disabling the hard way - after the fact, without any cut-over to Blogger. Sad. True, however.

I'd hate to be Kelly Wilson in all this, the lightning rod person when others higher in the AOL food chain called the shots, but that's why Kelly gets a paycheck, to be the point of attack.

Sad, again. But true again, however.

One comment in the first Kelly Wilson post I linked to said, try to salvage what you can from the WayBack Machine Internet archive, see here and here. Putting in the link "http://hometown.aol.com/Cyrion7/celtic/index.htm" into the WayBack Machine entry window gets: this, active archive, 1998 to 2003.

Years of work. Blottoed by AOL, the user-friendly service provider, sort of.

Editing the URL for that archive, from:

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://hometown.aol.com/Cyrion7/celtic/index.htm

by changing the end "index.htm" to "*" gives a file listing, showing none of the site's images were archived, only opening HTML pages, apparently.

http://web.archive.org/web/*sr_11nr_10/http://hometown.aol.com/Cyrion7/celtic/*

(That edit to get the listing of files from the returned page is not well known, but there, if you remember when next using the WayBack Machine service.)

Opening one of the archive item listings shows Karen Nicholas was the Celtic art page creator-owner. Also you can see that she had two links to her other AOL pages, each getting the same "sorry Charlie" page link-over, to Kelly Wilson's "Hometown Has Been Shut Down" message. Curiously, at least two of Karen Nicholas' older links are still active, one a Yahoo Geocities item, see here and here. They're not the best Celtic pages, more on that later.

This Google = "Karen Nicholas" celtic -- shows a number of sites crediting their background art, buttons, etc., to the now dead AOL - Karen Nicholas site. That's a lot of love down the tubes, courtesy of AOL and how NOT to do business.

For example, the starting Kristen McDermott page, and "Celtic Studies at UCLA" respectively use images to tile their background in a somewhat standard website design fashion,

these being the base images (from the Karen Nicholas collection) tiled two dimensionally in one instance, and vertically in the other (viewing page source for these site pages will show BACKGROUND commands, for those who care to have a look,image names in the page source files being lt_catknot.gif and brdr7001.gif respectively).

So, a few interesting "still alive" sites for those who like Celtic art, there is this Google. There is this, from Google Images. Some active artists are creating new things in the Celtic tradition, in jewelry, tattoos, and graphics. Find tattoos on your own.

Developers are Crabgrass

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Sunday, November 30, 2008

Dale Carnegie; AOL showing why it is a king-sized failure, anguish, and the mysteries of blogging. Backup redux.