Hi to anyone who may be sticking with me here! Been a busy few weeks. Seems like its always feast or famine with my writing clients – everyone needing something at once leaves little time for blogging. But, hey someone’s gotta help pay to keep the lights on around here.
Anyway, found this great photography resource while working on my experimental site Online Degree Discussion. more…
In a desperate, 11th hour attempt to save a bit of Internet history, a small group of folks have grabbed a huge chunk of the many sites once hosted on Yahoo!’s free Geocities service.
While most rightly agree that many of those sites were spamfests, there were more than a few sites that are certainly worth saving. I loved the sites on Geocities. They were created out of a pure passion for a subject and the desire to share with others a bit of ourselves and our talents. Many were created before anyone ever heard of an upstart company in California called Google and long before there were so many ways to make money from websites. There just was a certain honesty and dare I say purity about many of those early sites.
When I searched for sites to add to Crafty Tips Arts & Crafts Directory and Pet Site Guides I would often look around for Geocities sites. I dreaded the closure and absolutely hated having to go through both directories and remove those sites for which I could not find a forwarding address for.
Enter the folks at Reocities Archive. In a mammoth, nail biting, all for broke effort, they single handedly tried to grab as many Geocities pages as possible. Word spread of their efforts and several others came forward to help. Despite rumors to the contrary, Archive.org did not have some agreement with Yahoo! to archive all of the pages and in fact according to the folks at Reocities, Archive.org staffers contacted Reocities for assistance and directory information.
I had thought about trying to grab some of the great arts and crafts sites myself and somehow preserve them. My concern over copyrights and funding kept me from seriously pursuing that idea. I’m still not so sure about how Reocities is going to fare copyright wise. I wonder if even Yahoo! could somehow come after them for infringement. From a personal perspective, if Yahoo! did make such a move, it would be the last time I use any of their services. I’m not alone in my dismay that they took such a heavy handed and drastic move by simply turning out the lights. It seems like there where more options open to them than that. A petition on Reocities likens what Yahoo! did to the destruction of ancient artifacts by the Taliban.
As a writer and someone who has spent countless hours fighting my own recent copyright infringement situation, I worry for the folks at Reocities that one of the Geocities page owners goes after them based on copyright. From the pages I have seen, there appears to be no revenue generating advertisements on Reocities. Unless the people behind the site can continue to fund such a massive project, it would seem they are going to have to generate revenue somehow. Perhaps they could set something up like Wikipedia where they have fund drives to keep their servers running.
The project is far from complete and at present the site is set up as an archive only, meaning no new content will be added. There’s no search capability and you sorta have to know how things used to be set up to find things. But who cares – they actually did it – 2,367,095 accounts restored and still counting! They are also asking for folks who happened to save the code from their Geocities pages to get into contact and Reocities will be trying to post their pages as well. Best of all, the truly useless Geocities pages are being culled from the pile and will drop off the Internet and into the trash heap of history where they belong.
Today, I’ll be adding the first of these wonderful pages to Crafty Tips – MaryM’s Original Crochet Tatting Designs. I hope the Reocities Archive can continue building and maintaining these Internet treasures long-term.
Rubber stamping, scrapbooking and paper crafts have always intrigued me but my oh-so-limited drawing skills have made a little easier to “just say no” to all the pretty papers, inks, embossing powders and stamps. After all, I already have enough beads, yarn and fabric to stock a small store. The idea of starting a new craft that requires a whole new set of supplies would be a bit foolhardy on my part considering my current financial situation. I do find these paper crafts fascinating and admire the folks who can make beautiful cards and other works of art.
While looking for some new rubber stamping sites to add to Crafty Tips, I discovered a great way for rubber stampers, scrapbookers and paper artists to share their creations and challenge themselves to be even more creative – weekly challenge sites.
The weekly challenges are a clever way some rubber stamping companies and other artists are promoting the art of rubber stamping. These challenge sites have a weekly theme, pattern or must use image and then the artists are challenged to come up with something wonderful following that week’s rules. The results are absolutely amazing! Many of the creations are then posted on the original site and a prize is awarded to a favorite design or via a random draw.
In the Rubber Stamping category I have added a new section called Rubber Stamping Challenges. There’s three great sites listed there now and I plan on adding more in the weeks to come.
Whether you are a rubber stamping god or goddess or are someone who simply admires those who are, be sure to check out these great sites and be inspired by all of the creativity on display.
Oh, I have so been dreading the day that Yahoo! closes GeoCities. It meant the end of many great websites, not just crafting ones.
I remember the days long before there ever was a Google or blogs for that matter.
Having a GeoCities site was something really special. It was like having a giant wall all of your own to put whatever graffiti you wanted. People could have their own little place on this not-completely understood thing called the Internet.
Today has been the day I finally bit the bullet and am going through the listings on Crafty Tips Arts & Crafts Directory. Way too many great crafting sites have disappeared into the either. Some might be found on Archive.org but most are going to be gone forever.
The bright side is that there will be fewer and fewer broken links on Crafty Tips and some of the Geocities sites have been moved to new homes. So, please if your Geocities website was listed on Crafty Tips and is now missing, please contact me. I would like to either change your URL to your new home or talk to you about a potential new one.
But, the greatest disappointment today was seeing that Dot Matthew’s wonderful crochet pattern site has become abandoned. The Photobucket account she was using for virtually all of her pictures has been disabled due to inactivity and therefore almost all of her great patterns are now without pictures.
Unfortunately, the way her site was designed, even the Archive.org pages no longer have pictures.
One visitor to the site posted that she thinks Dot passed away sometime in the middle of 2006. If you visited Dot’s site when all of the pictures were still working, you would have seen a beautiful, happy, smiling woman who unfortunately required the use of a portable oxygen tank. I had often wondered if she had any plans for the site to continue should she become unable to care for it herself. It’s such a shame that it looks like she never made those sort of arrangements.
I was never fortunate enough to meet Dot but I will miss her just the same. She had to be one of the most prolific and talented crochet designers out there.
Her main site By The Hook is still online and all of her great patterns are still online, just now pictureless. She had a second blog My Year of Crochet 2006 where the last post was dated in July of 2006. According to that second site, it looks like Dot had at least one granddaughter named Gracie (that cutie’s picture is fortunately still online) and two grandsons.
If anyone knows how to contact a member of Dot’s family, please let me know. It would be such a shame to let her work remain in the condition it currently is in.
I can’t imagine that there are more than a few crocheters, myself included, who would be willing to work together to create a more permanent and fully functional home for all of her great work.
We could donate space for a new home for her patterns or even a place to house just her pictures so her site can be fixed. I also suspect there would be someone willing to purchase the patterns outright or work with the family to publish them in book form.
It seems like the way things stand now, her patterns remain for honest crocheters to still enjoy. The problem is that there appears to be no one around to protect Dot’s copyrights. I found at least one accusation that someone has already published a book containing one of Dot’s patterns. Hopefully, the had obtained permission first.
This does serve as a reminder to all of us that we should leave some written instructions somewhere about what to do with our websites.
I love fall! It’s that time of year when everyone seems to return to the regular routines that work, school and the end of summer brings.
Colorful leaves and crisp temperatures inspire me to leave the lazy days of summer behind and get more serious about projects that have lingered undone. Not to say that I spent my summer lazing about. It was a busy time. Both my writing business and my other online activities have been picking up. But, there’s just something about fall that invigorates my step and really tightens my focus.
I really enjoy running Crafty Tips. I have met so many interesting people and visited so many wonderful websites. The artisans and crafters represented on the site often inspire my own creativity.
It takes a great deal of time to maintain a directory-style site like Crafty Tips. Ensuring all of the links are fully functional is almost a full-time job within itself. All too often owners of directories and other sites with resource lists simply don’t take the time to audit the links to ensure they remain functional and relevant.
In the past, my audit strategy was to simply visit each of the sites, from oldest to newest every six months or so. I would often set aside a week-end and try to revisit each and every site. That strategy was somewhat successful when the site was smaller but has become overwhelming now that there are over 625 links and counting.
I’ve noticed more and more directories and resource sites are littered with dead and dying sites. Some resource sites have become virtually useless with links pointing to old and now defunct AOL Hometown pages, sites that have changed hands and sites that are no longer online. I realized auditing my listings could not wait. I didn’t want to work so hard to create Crafty Tips only to have it become virtually useless simply because I failed to keep house.
With renewed purpose and a new strategy I have been auditing the categories, one by one. I’ve removed quite a few dead links, moved some to new categories and flagged some as either down temporarily or on their way to being disbanded. It has been disappointing how many great crafting websites are no longer active but the process has truly proven the need for more frequent auditing.
There are still quite a few categories to visit and I’m also taking this time to build some of the smaller categories or ones where there were a number of casualties. But, now I have a plan, a scorecard and know that eventually, every single listing will be reviewed.
I know, a lot of words to say that I am upping my efforts to ensure that Crafty Tips Arts & Crafts Directory will only showcase active websites that represent some of the most talented artisans and crafters on the web today. I believe it is my commitment to maintaining a quality site that will keep Crafty Tips the much loved site that it is.
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