Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Time for a New Home, Then Back to Work

Well, I'll be a bit distracted for the next week or so. I have to move Cyndi's List to a new web host server in the next week. I'm really nervous about it. In fact, I'm kinda freaking out. I've been extremely fortunate to have had the same host since 1998. So, I've fallen into a comfortable routine and know what to expect or not expect. The unknown future is scaring me a bit. And change is bad, right?

I'm investigating local services and national services. Basically I need someone who will hold my hand 24/7, charge me next to nothing, and send me chocolates on a weekly basis. If anyone knows of such a web site hosting service please be sure to let me know. BTW, that would be dark chocolate.

This has preoccupied me for over a week now. And prior to that I had been on quite a roll working on backlogs of links. I have a backlog of link requests that goes back to September 2003 (all are available through the search engines on my site, but just aren't in categories yet). Also, after moving my office downstairs, I'm cleaning up old file folders, boxes, etc. and I'm finding all sorts of fliers, business cards, scraps of paper, and to-do lists that I've saved for years----all with URLs for sites or ideas for links and categories. It has been like stepping into a time machine and finding little bits of my brain from several years ago. After the site is safely moved I'll be back to work on the backlog.

The backlog of links bothers me. It first started about 6 months after the site was born in 1996. I started off working on the site about 2 hours every day. As the new link requests came in I started working more and more hours each day, but was still getting further and further behind. By 1998 I had a huge backlog sitting in my IN box. So, I had a programmer create a script for me to automatically submit the links and put them on the "What's New" pages and in the mailing list posts each day. That way the links weren't out of sight on my computer's hard drive doing no one any good. Now all the newly submitted links are available to everyone, but they still need to be put into categories. And not getting to them to be categorized quicker bothers me. I'm thinking of challenging myself. If I did a month every week I could get them done in 43 weeks. Oh, that doesn't sound very good. Maybe I should stop thinking about it and just work on them. After I get done freaking out and get the site moved to its new home. Where's my chocolate...

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