My Old Music Pages: Temporarily Kaput
Posted by Lynnster on December 15, 2008
So I discovered today that my old music pages at AOL, that were there forever, are now gone.
This comes as no real surprise, since I’ve been expecting them to disappear for months and kept being shocked over and over again that they were still there, as I quit AOL for good months ago after having spent years on the “cheap” plan just to keep those pages up and hold onto the voluminous FTP space they (used to) give you.
So no shocker there. What did come as a surprise, though, was discovering that not only were my old pages gone but apparently AOL cut off EVERYBODY’S web space without notice in early November – poof, all gone. I found an announcement that they were ceasing operation of AOL Hometown, and about a thousand outraged comments in response from AOL users incensed that they couldn’t retrieve not only their pages, but their FTP files. Since I was a “minimal” user and still had about 7 screen names’ worth of FTP space 100% full of files (pretty much all of which I have stored elsewhere), I can only imagine how much active users lost, and probably didn’t have stuff stored somewhere else. But that’s a whole other post in itself, and if you had stuff stored and on the Web from AOL and haven’t checked it in a while – well, I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but there ya go.
But the reason I’m really posting about it is because I do indeed have the most recent versions of all those music pages on my hard drive, so I will toss them up somewhere else when I have time to do so – the Gurus page, the Replacements page, the Persian Rugs page, the old Monarchs site, and my Paul Westerberg quotes page.
They’re really nothing all that special, especially in this present Internet day and age – I mean, come on, they’re all over ten years old now for the most part – but a lot of other music sites on the ‘Net have been linking to them for years, so I want to put them back up somewhere and maybe some of them will find them again.
As for AOL, seems like they’re shooting themselves in the foot killing thousands of people’s web pages and regressing and going backwards instead of progressing, as far as Internet technology goes, but whatever. It lost its charm for me about 15 years ago and I’m always surprised when I run across people that still use it.
