Any free webmastery out there?

Back before the Dawn of Time, Doug Doremus and I started our own free webpage on Geocities.com. All that was needed was a rudimentary grasp of HTML and a few hours here and there to add articles. Over the years it grew, we got our own domain and called it voodoocanoe.com. With the advent of phones and tablets, came the need for cascading style sheets, Word Press, SSL's and a whole lot more money just to keep the site running. It's gotten so complicated that I spend all my time keeping it running and have no time to add any content. Everyone has a solution for me which involves deleting everything, changing to a new platform, then reloading it all. I've done it several times and never quite upload the old articles before it presents another problem.

Today I tried to open the site and it won't load. I can't even tell if it still exists. Godaddy support is useless. So I'm done with it. If anyone out there wants to deal with the nuts and bolts of it, that would be great. Otherwise I'll just sell the domain name. I just don't have time to keep up!

Yes, managing a web site has gotten a lot more complicated over the past few decades and migrating from one platform to another can be a real pain. The good news is that the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine has been periodically saving copies of your site since 2000 as shown in the first link below so all is not lost. The second link below indicates that the voodoocanoe.com domain will not expire for three years so you have some time to figure everything out. This canoetripping.net site is a good place for your new trip reports. You could even add some of your old adventures here if you wanted to share the best of voodoocanoe.com. The market value of the voodoocanoe.com domain name may be less than you think. Good luck,

Benson

Sorry to hear about the site issues (I've previously read and enjoyed many of your stories there). I tried loading & couldn't do it either.

I can't help with your tech issues but, if you don't mind me asking, I'm curious about what costs are involved.

I've only just started building my site which I built on Google sites (now Squarespace). I have to figure it all out by myself but it's not hard to navigate, it's only $12 a year to own the URL and it has, so far, been trouble free. I suspect that I'm small enough that I don't attract the attention of hackers but I really hope that I haven't opened a money pit.

Nice website! I stopped keeping track of costs but it's something like $50 or $60 a year s long as you buy multiple years. I just might go check Squarespace out.

Well, by all means, post it here if you migrate- I've read some of your stories & like your style.

BTW: I post all canoe trip reports on here as well as my site so that, when my site eventually goes dark (hopefully after I'm dead), the stories will still remain without something like web.archive.

I have yet to find a similar site for the hiking trips, etc. so maybe those will fade into the abyss... I guess we'll see.

Best of luck putting it all together (again).

Oh yeah, if you try Squarespace, make sure you use the tool to view it in phone, tablet & desktop modes. I had to tear mine down & rebuild it 3 times before it looked ok on a phone (could have just used the widget to switch views & I'd have known that). Cheers.

Benson Gray said:

The good news is that the Internet Archive's WayBack Machine has been periodically saving copies of your site since 2000 as shown in the first link below so all is not lost.

Click to expand...

Thanks for posting the link to the wayback machine. I've done the section of the Pemi described in the The Flood twice - with Doug in 2019 and with Matt in 2021, so I have heard the story twice. When I went looking for the website I couldn't find it, so it was great to actually read the story.