Saturday, February 11, 2023

How I Wasted a Saturday...

I have three websites that I created circa 2001-2003, some 20 years ago.

Series Books for Girls
New World Zorro
Zorro: The Legend Through the Years

At the moment, the first two sites are screwed up to some degree due to today's misadventures.

The sites were created on the Yahoo! Geocities interface.  The original URLs for my sites were as follows.

www.geocities.com/brmthebgs
www.geocities.com/newworldzorro
www.goecities.com/thezorrolegend

Each site was on a different Yahoo! account, and the account IDs can be seen at the end of the URLs.  

Yahoo! got tired of its older assets, gradually shutting everything down.  Geocities was shut down, and the sites were moved to Yahoo! Small Business.  By the time that happened, I had already purchased domains for all three sites, so the URLs had already changed to what they are now.

Yahoo! Small Business then rebranded to Aabaco.  No problem, that just meant that I logged in through a different-looking page.

Aabaco rebranded to Luminate.  Okay, this was getting a little weird, but I no longer cared much about any of the sites by that point.  I just let Yahoo! rebrand and didn't worry about it.

The Yahoo! assets of Luminate were purchased by Verizon or moved to Verizon.  I don't even know.  I have had other concerns during the last five or so years, so I didn't pay much attention.

I still had access, and that was all that mattered.  I checked on one of the sites last month and discovered that it (along with the other two sites) had been acquired by Turbify during the last six months.  The interface had changed to Cpanel on two of the sites and was still the old Yahoo! file manager on the third site.

I am still being charged by Aabaco each month, and the name hasn't been Aabaco in years!  What nonsense is this?  They sell the assets but keep using an older name to charge their clients.  Maybe that's to avoid us doing a chargeback since we'll recognize the old name.

I was annoyed and decided that this needed to end.  The only way to stop this idiocy was to remove my sites from the former Yahoo! Geocities assets.  

For lack of a better idea, I signed up for web hosting on GoDaddy.  I went with it only because I already had a user ID.  It might not be the best choice, but I needed a fast solution. This was two weeks ago.

I then looked up how to transfer a domain.  Every step of this has required me to do Google searches to learn what to do.  It has been a mess.  It's still a mess, actually.  But anyway...

I figured it out.  I initiated the domain transfers of series-books.com and zorrolegend.com.  I had to wait one week for newworldzorro.com due to when the registration was last renewed.  Domains cannot be transferred until 60 days after a renewal.  

Last weekend, I got the series-books.com files in place and the site changed over to the GoDaddy web hosting.   

I'm keeping all three Turbify accounts until I have this entire mess fixed.  It's going to be awhile.  I won't risk losing the sites, so I'm paying twice for hosting for each site right now.

The series-books.com website is partially hosted by newworldzorro.com.  Even though I moved series-books.com last weekend, many images remained on Turbify.

Today I worked on newworldzorro.com.  It didn't work.  I had purchased GoDaddy web hosting where one account can host up to 10 domains.  I spent most of the day trying to get newworldzorro.com to work as hosted with my new series-books.com account.  I could not figure it out.

I googled for information, finding someone with the same problem who also couldn't get it to work.  That was when I gave up.  

I created a second GoDaddy account just for newworldzorro.com.  I finally have it working... sort of.  It looks awful.

Zorrolegend.com is still fully on Turbify even though I now control the domain.  I will finish the other two sites before I work on it.

What happened today is that I made multiple mistakes.  At one point, series-books.com showed the home page of newworldzorro.com.  Later, I had two Series Books for Girls websites online at series-books.com and newworldzorro.com.  And then after that, newworldzorro went down when I removed it from my first GoDaddy account and created the second GoDaddy account.

So now, the newworldzorro.com DNS propagation is under way.  I'm seeing different versions of the site when I refresh, one of them significantly more screwed up than the other.  Since many of the series-books.com images are hosted by newworldzorro.com, series-books.com is also screwed up to some degree.

Some pages could even be missing from within the sites.  I'm afraid to look.

I haven't lost any of the content.  I still have the Turbify accounts in place.  I had to go back to both of the sites on Turbify at least once today when I screwed up.

So that's how I spent my Saturday.  I will be working on this on Sunday, but I should hopefully make more progress tomorrow.

There could be some typos in this post.  I'm not sure that I care.  

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