The End of an Era in Personal Website Building

     After more than 16 years online, I chose to shut down my old Angelfire.com website which had been one of the earliest iterations of “LibraryTrekker’s Star Trek InfoBarn”, originally known as “LibraryTrekker’s Star Trek Web Database”.

     As I was logging in to angelfire’s website builder control panel for the first time in years this week, I realized that the login page did not have a secure connection. This really concerned me. It made no sense, at least to me, that Lycos (the owner of angelfire.com) didn’t use a secure connection for customers’ login. That is cybersecurity 101, I would think. I’ve never taken an actual cybersecurity course but every other site I log into has a secure login page.

     After logging in and looking around the control panel and other portions of the site builder I discovered that the amount of storage that was available to me was only 20 MB and I had used 13.2 MB. That’s 66% of the total storage available. At this point I should mention that this was a free account and there are account types that a person could pay for with increasing amount of storage with a maximum amount of 5GB at a yearly cost of $109.45; so, 20 MB for a free account is understandable… for 2003, not 2020. The host for the current iteration of the “InforBarn” and the entire “LibraryTrekker’s Webase” for that matter, provides 512MB of storage for free accounts. As of this month (January 2020), “LibraryTrekker’s Webase”, in its entirety, uses 103.9MB of storage on the host’s servers, that 20.29% of the 512MB provided. I can’t image needing more than the 512 but no one knows what the future holds.

     Subsequent to browsing through the angelfire.com site builder, I logged out and visited the actual site. Clicking through the site and seeing the banner ads was annoying but each link I clicked within the site resulted in a popup ad appearing every. Single. Time. The ad was not being blocked by the browser I was using either so there must have code built into the pages that bypassed the popup blocker.

     With these issues and concerns uncovered, I chose to shut down the site and delete the account. Once the account was deleted, there was a brief moment of sadness because I had ended something I had created while in college which had been a fairly good time in my life. However, the site can be resurrected. Ten years ago, I saved the files for the site from angelfire.com and still have them with no changes from the online versions of the files. If I choose to resurrect the site as a subsection of the current “Webase”, I’ll have to do some major HTML code maintenance on the pages before I upload them to my current webhost and that will take time. Right now, I have all the time in the world do to it but, there’s no time like the present. 😏

Until the next blog post from yours truly, “Live Long and Prosper.”