the history of my website

I got my own personal website when I went to work for a library at Stanford and was put in charge of maintaining the department's internal website (manuals, project status sheets, etc.). To help me do this, I was sent to a staff training class that taught us how to hand-code HTML - this was 20 years ago, and web design programs were still rare - and had us practice this by creating our own personal pages on the university server. I put in a then-new photo of me at work, and links to a few pieces of mine that others had already loaded onto the web.

I gradually added more pages to the web site, especially before I got a new outlet by starting a blog. Design and color scheme, as I previously mentioned, were chosen with the help of Vonda N. McIntyre. I was looking for a background color as dark and unglaring as possible that black type would still be easily visible on, and she helped me with that. When I left Stanford, I moved the site over to the web-hosting of my personal e-mail provider, Earthlink, and there it's sat ever since, occasionally updated. I keep my personal bibliography and list of concert reviews updated, and add things as they come in to other lists like the one of the Inklings in fiction. Other projects I've let fall behind. But it's still all (except outside links) my own raw hand-coded HTML.

So things were until a month ago, while I was in New York, and found that the whole Earthlink web site was down while it was being migrated. Eventually it came back, but at first my web site didn't. It was only after receiving a cryptically-phrased e-mail and getting some clarification from phone help that I learned that Earthlink was phasing out the customer web pages that were being kept on their own server.

They were, however, still offering web hosting; you just had to get your own domain. It's taken me four long phone conversations with the web hosting people (all very helpful and intelligent; all men with the same voice and the same heavy Indian accent; each with a different name like "Frank") to get this up and running - not uploading the files; that was the easy part; but getting the web site recognized and available as one glitch or omission or another got addressed - but it's up now. I love the direct file uploader, which is much smoother and less gnarled than the FTP I used to use, and I am now the proud owner of https://www.dbratman.net. Please change any previous URLs you have for me, and let's hope this gets propagated onto Google and such in searches for me.