pronker

So, I only made it about half-way through the Snowflake Challenge this year before getting derailed. (Although I will at least finish answering comments!) Part of it's due to RL being exhausting thanks to family injuries and a massive current work project, but part of it is something extra and unexpected.

Tripod (the website hosting site) appears to be finally dying. I've had a site there since at least 2002, maybe even 2000, I think before it was owned by Lycos; the public-facing parts of my page hadn't been updated in years, but I still used it for things like image hosting all the time, and I kept a few things there (scraps of original fiction and poetry, for example) that had never been added to any other archive. But this month I got a weird email notice that the monthly credit card billing had failed, and that if it wasn't corrected within 16 days I'd lose my subscription features. This was the error referenced:

The error message is 'Batch Submitted No Results,Cleanup'.

Which ...has nothing to do with my actual credit card info, as far as I can tell. But I still tried to log in to check. Well, I'd noticed that my paid jedibuttercup domain name had been intermittently having issues forwarding to the underlying tripod web address before, but now it only gives "This site can't be reached" errors. Direct HTML links to my shellpatine tripod site still connect, but when I try to access the admin side of the site at all (to check the aforementioned financial info, or see what files actually are saved there that are not linked on the public webpages such as the photos), all I get are 500 errors that claim "There has been an error with one of our scripts".

It doesn't seem like Lycos is answering support requests, either. I think it's going the way of the dodo.

And then, of course, there are recent developments with LJ going full Russian... and there are a lot of old Dreamwidth posts here that were scraped over when I first transferred that still contain a lot of internal LJ links, photos hosted there, and so on. (I can't see those at work at all; our IT company now filters LJ out entirely for, well, being Russian). I'd like to go ahead and completely purge my old LJ, but I am a little wary of doing that until I've checked all those links (especially photos &etc.).

So, two birds, one fix, although more urgent for one reason than the other. I've started opening every post on my Dreamwidth in the evenings, beginning with the oldest, and have been working my way back through them fixing or eliminating LJ links; grabbing any link that went to my private site, modifying it to use the tripod address, and seeing if it linked to something I want to save; and so on. It's ... a lot. I've still got several years' worth to go through.

It's not all terrible, though. I get to look at all my old photos from when I posted them regularly, and I've found some of that original work, now being rehomed on AO3 under the college pseud behind the name of the failing site: shellpatine. :)