Personal website / webspace

[NickStone]

Before there was Facebook and MySpace most people who wanted to tell the world there personal life had a personal website hosted by services such as GEOCities, Tripod (to name but two).

Since the creation of services like Facebook and MySpace I don't get to see peoples personal websites anymore and feel its become a dying trend. Have you ever had your own personal website in the past and more importantly do you still maintain it today? If you do, which services do you use?

[woodsmoke]

Hi
I had a personal website for my Calypso menu system. I used Go-Daddy.

I maintained a website for my former church before they discovered that it was much easier to throw money at a company than to trust their parishoners to keep the website. It was hosted by the national church's servers. I think that the national church has now discontinued them.

When I started my online book publishing venture a coupla years ago I got a website but dropped it because there were very few hits the customers went to the wholesaler and only as a click through to my website. I also bought 6 versions of the domain names to avoid domain name squatters, but have dropped them. I also used Go-daddy then.

I presently am maintaining my new church's website, which is on a "freebie" site that "kind of" specializes in small organizations, clubs, etc. that want to learn on a basic site. It operates, rather poorly, using an interface that is basically kind of a crossover of the old "Nvue" and MS FrontPage 2000. If one pays for any kind of premium service there the site enables "FrontPage extensions", which went away when Microsith went to the Expression Studio.

I agree that the whole facebook thing has splintered the situation.

I will be establishing a Facebook page.

The church also has a Facebook page, and it gets oh about..... fifty times the useage, by parishoners, that the website does.

The only reason, to me nowadays, for a small group, person, to have a "website" is that one has the "metatags" that the various search engines can find and then one could go to the facebook page.

woodsmoke

[claydoh]

I have had claydoh.com for many years, I often use it to play with various CMS systems, but currently just have my wordpress blog there.

I have been using Surpass hosting (shared) the whole time, almost zero issues over the years, and reasonably priced for the features and speed. I have used it to host a couple of club websites, as well as the highly inactive Maine Ubuntu LoCo team's websites.

A lot of web hosts provide cpanel, which makes installing and configuring software such as drupal, joomla, Gallery, etc. nearly a click and go affair. Also makes managing email accounts, mysql databases easy as well. A built in file browser is a plus, too, though Dolphin works just fine for that.

I do say Wordpress makes things too easy, if you find a theme to your liking, or one that is configurable. I have yet to have to ftp into the blog to update the thing, or to have to hack a php file. It has some limitations in look and feel without some modification I think, but WP does not have to be a blog site.

Drupal, however much I do like it, is a sheer beast. You have to bend it to your needs to use it imo.

Consider Wordpress like a well set up smart phone in terms of use, management, and appearance.

Drupal is more like a desktop running a bare installation of Arch with maybe openbox installed and not much else.

Ooh, I ramble. Time to stop

[ScottyK]

Back in the 90's I used to do the whole Geocities thing. Then in 2000 I bought the first of several domains. I pay on two of them every year. Initially I was using them for a website, post family pictures and so forth.

But then privacy became a concern, and with the advent of Facebook, it was much easier to just post the family pics on Facebook.

But Facebook's privacy is getting to open, and I've installed Piwigo to one of my dormant domains and started playing around with it.

[woodsmoke]

ScottyK
Thanks much for the mention of Piwigo.
Depending on what happens if the church goes to a paid site, I'll maybe use it.
I'm wondering if, I kept a computer "online" all the time, if I used Piwigo, if i could be my own "host" and link to an image stored on that "server" and display it at say, Kubu forums?
Of course, if the computer is offline then people wouldn't see the image and if the pics were so popular that jillions of people looked at them my cable company might complain, but..
just wonderin'

thanks again

woodsmoke

[benny_fletch]

I have & maintain a couple of websites. My main website ( recommendeddose.net ) has been maintain since 2002 and I am currently working on the third revision. For this site I own the domain and it is hosted by mydomain.com , which allows scripting (Java, CGI, PHP) and allows you setup and use SQL databases if needed. Mydomain also allows you to choose the type of hosting server you use (I chose a linux server versus a windows one). I stay away from GoDaddy for two reasons, I have known a couple of people who have had issues with them and the fact they supported SOPA.

I also host a webpage on my own server (my desktop computer) which I uses Apache. All my sites use only HTML, CSS, and PHP. I haven't tried any CRM or LAMP websites yet, but I am not opposed to them (just haven't had the time to learn any).

I do not have (or ever had) a facebook or myspace account, although I do have a blogspot site to share experiences and pictures with my family and friends.

[notabug]

I had a small military/POW based site in the late 90's. I still have the html pages and pics on my hard drive for those times I might want to reminisce. I had the site hosted on my ISP's server, so it wasn't anything complicated and I took it offliine shortly after CSS started becoming popular. It was fun and I learned a little bit, but since then I've had no interest in starting another one. Yes, I do have a Facebook page, but it isn't a big part of my daily routine (or weekly routine even).

[vinnywright]

well I used to have one ........on my desktop ,I got a domain name from DYN-DNS and ran Apache ,a index.html page I made in quanta+ and Konqueror generated photo gallery’s,+ links to my music collection so I could enjoy it from anywhere.

curiously I would find in the log files quite often stuff like ........denied access to: /var/www/bla,bla,bla from request ......then a LONG string of stuff like x866 x866 x896 x896 ......or something like that .
I always figured it was a hack attempt

VINNY

[SecretCode]

It's possible I created one and forgot about it, but I don't think I ever had a personal web site in that sense. I had a family site on blogspot.com ... now unmaintained.

I built and still (ahem, in principle) maintain a business site on my own domain with nothing more powerful than cPanel. HTML pages and CSS code lovingly crafted in whichever text editor I've preferred at the time.

The Residents' Association where I used to live had a website, also on its own domain, based on Joomla. Or was it Drupal? Set up by another resident and then edited by my energetic wife.

No geocities. No Myspace. And I would never admit to having been on Facebook.

[jpenguin]

I have had many personal websites over the years, blog, CMS's, photo galleries, download mirrors & forums. My 2 present websites are mybb forums for a minetest server thelunarrepublic.site90.net and the other is for my minecraft server tuxcraft.cu.cc tuxcraft.oss