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I’ve done it. I’ve gone and done it. I’ve finally gone and done it. There are other phrases to describe completion of a task, and the achievement that goes with that, and the feeling of satisfaction that goes with both those things. If those opening phrases of mine don’t seem appropriate after you’ve read this, supply your own.
The Website
When I was eith Internode, it was a time when ISP’s (and that’s an apostrophe of contraction, as was the one in ‘that’s’, although the ones bracketing the pronoun were…another kind of apostrophe) supplied you with additional things to keep you loyal to them. It was a competitive market because there were multiple ISPs (no apostrophe there, just in case). But consolidation happened around the time the dotcom bubble burst, and so nowadays ost ISPs are run by phone companies who aren’t in a competitive market. So, Internode offered me personal webspace.
www.users.on.net/~hippy/default.htm was the address. Don’t look for it now. Internode got rid of personal webspace about ten years ago now, and I had to move it to another provider
Extreme Networks
My brother worked for this excellent company. I’d recommend them if I had a better idea of what they actually do. What they actually did do was host my personal webspace fora a while. During that time, I was trying to learn HTML, so I was adding pages just because I’d found out how to do it, I was using Microsoft Expression Web and getting used to writing things with angle brackets and putting ‘target=”_blank”‘ on links. I had been using Frontpage because I could get it cheaply under the academic pricing model they had, thanks to studying at RMIT. So, from time to time, as I found new things to do with HTML, or the spirit moved me, I would add various things to it. It wasn’t elegant, and it didn’t do much, and it had less of my personal expression than LiveJournal or even Captain Lychee, essentially because there’s more stuff on it.
Including, from some internet meme or other that I don’t recall, The Foxfoe. I left it there, and added a few more things, but essentailly the website languished until 2024, when my brother left Extreme Networks and went to work for…someone or other. They make seeds and sell them for farms, nurseries, whatever. So, he suggested I move CaptLychee.com to DreamITHost, so I did. They’re also hosting this WordPress blog that I had to do for uni and update really sporadically.
But I didn’t move the original Internode site.
And then, along came Geoff Ball.
Quality Fiction
I studdied English Literature in high school with Geoff and Vanessa Berry and, I disocerd recently, he and I didn’t do that well at it. But we have both perservered at writing, and Geoff put up a few stories at the link above, for which he wanted commentgs. Well, if there’s anything I like expressing more than my opinion, I don’t know what it is, so I ventured some. I vengture this summary here—they’re good.
So, we offered to share some stories with each other, and I was going to point him to ‘The Foxfoe’ but discovered that the website it appeared on was no longer on the Internet, because I’d backed it up after Internode removed personal webspace after jacking up their fees. There was nothing for it but to find the story on one of my hard drives and email it to him. But that reminded me that the rest of the wegbsite was also no longer on the Internet, so nobody could see it unless it was on the Internet Archive, and what were the chances of that?
Return of the Website
And so, I determined to return the website to the Internet, so everyone could be exposed to the ‘The Foxfoe’ and other aspects of my egotism. The real horror was trying to get the damn thing online using File Transfer Protocol. I had to get my brother to help with that. There seems to be sometning with DreamITHost’s setup that makes FTP really difficult, or really confusing.
The problem seems to be that Expression Web 4—which, now that I think of it, I paid for—uses different terms than DreamITHost. ‘Location, ‘directory’, ‘sever’—I know what these words mean in some contexts, but in the context of transferring files, nope. And sometimes differnet terms are used for the smae ting.
Anyway, over the years, one thing I did learn to do was register domain ammes. As part of Ballarat Writers, I had had various conversations that inspird domains I could register. One of them was bagmyshit.com, and more of that when I get around to doing the actual website. But I had played around with an anagram of my name.
Rotundrear.com
The website has returned, including ‘The Foxfoe’ and a few other things, and I’ll update a few of the things that aren’t working, if I can. UNtil that happens, enjoy what’s there.