What a good job you have done in putting together such a good website. Full of lots of goodies. Not quite enough to get a PH.D. . . .
Ah, yes - for one thing, not nearly enough bibliographic citations!
Congrats on the migration!
Thanks. The motivation for doing it is a fascinating story, which I omitted from the "removal notice" to avoid clogging up the message.
I started my modern data exchange life as a customer of CompuServe (Internet-like), but later tied into the real Internet via an ISP called AT&T Worldnet Services. Access was via dial-up modem.
The service provided for six "accounts", each of which had an e-mail address and 10 MB of storage for Web page hosting and the like (later expanded to 25 MB per "account").
The Pumpkin as you have come to know it was initially harbored on the hosting capability of one of those accounts, with other Web sites on several of the others (one for my seminar business, one for my consulting business, one for Carla's Red Hat Society chapter, and one for our little Episcopal church).
We finally decided to get DLS access, which we did through another AT&T arm (itself an entire ISP). I was concerned about having to migrate my e-mail addresses to their scheme, and wondered how I would host my Internet sites, but it turned out that they had a clever scheme that alleviated those concerns. As a subscriber to the AT&T DSL/Internet package, my AT&T Worldnet service could be maintained and put into a "no charge" basis (called the "Zero Dollar Plan"). So I proceeded on that basis.
As some of the enterprises behind my multiple Web sites moved into irrelevance, I repurposed two of the accounts, one to hold photographic images and one as an "expansion wing" for overflowing Pumpkin material.
Just recently, AT&T (now well coalesced and seeking to become something like integrated, unbreaking the egg that fell at Divestiture) decided to wind down AT&T Worldnet Services (actually, it is being transmogrified into AT&T's dial-up access arm). But in a show of good faith, those subscribers operating under the Zero Dollar plan would now be offered e-mail service through the "main" AT&T Internet operation (albeit through a slightly-peculiar compartment of it). But there would be no replacement for the Internet hosting capability (6 "accounts" at 25 MB each). The existing plans were to be shut down as of 2010.03.31.
They promised a fully-automated migration of the e-mail service. I decided two days ago that I would do that, and then start looking for a new Internet hosting contractor. The migration went without a hitch, despite some incomplete technical information about what needed to be done at my end (but I knew what I needed).
What I had not realized is that the migration of the e-mail accounts resulted in the immediate evaporation of the associated Internet hosting and the associated domain aliases. So I had to scurry to put an alternate hosting into place. (I had hoped to be able to make the migration and put up a "we've moved" page on the original site, but that is apparently out of reach.)
I decided for various reasons to go with the AT&T Web Hosting service (there is a discount for subscribers to their basic Internet service, including by way of their U-verse service, which is how all our terrestrial communication with the outside word here is now done).
The migration itself was fairly simple. I had to do some adjusting of the links on the Pumpkin main index, which pointed to documents stashed here and there around my AT&T Worldnet real estate, but much of that was able to be automated by search-and-replace in the HTML code.
The last wrinkle was getting the favicon to work properly. (A
favicon is the little icon that appears in the browser's address field next to the page address and next to the listing for a page in a "favorites" list - hence the name.)
This is a very mysterious area. Even the detailed recommendations from W3C about doing it contain caveats about "this might not always work". And things such as browser caching can confuse testing of different arrangements.
At present, the little pumpkin seems to appear fine when the browser is Firefox; it doesn't with Internet Explorer. (Well,
à chacun son égout.) I'll be interested to hear from users of other browsers.
My new host affords storage of 5 GB (my previous total was 150 MB) and what sounds like a monthly traffic limit of 200 GB (although the explanation is a little cryptic - I have to find out more about that).
So that's how The Pumpkin came to move.
One side effect is that all the images linked in my post here in the past are now on "dead links". If any of the topics erupt into importance, I'll reconstruct those.
Best regards,
Doug
