By Christine Albrecht
I have spent literally hours trying to find articles that I have posted on Swanktrendz between September 2006 and January, 2007. Why am I choosing to peruse old articles rather than have a life? It appears... (appears as no official statement or explanation has been offered) our website server/host suspended our account after mistakenly determining Swanktrendz was delinquent in its monthly payments.
These activities (searching for past articles and the suspension of Swanktrendz) brought to mind two questions: a) Do real ‘live’ human beings actually work at website server/host sites (or any internet sites for that matter.)? and, b) Can one actually ‘spend’ time? Obviously one can spend money, but is ‘spending time’ an accurate statement? Would my English Professor deduct marks for my use of slang/ colloquialism? Where did the expression originate? (Hell, if my English professor saw this website and my contributions, he’d probably remove his name from my transcripts, thus obliterating any trace of his involvement in my education.)
Now, back to the server... After the mistake was found (again, not publicly acknowledged by the company), my website was restored to its former glory - not! The server somehow managed to post my main page, period. The page led to nowhere. Not a single link was ‘live’, in working condition. After repeated attempts to contact the ‘live help desk’ (refer back to question a), I sent several responses to the host’s email determining the Swanktrendz website looked ‘fine’ from the host’s perspective and to ‘please tell us exactly what the problem appears to be”. After a day or so, I managed to secure the rest of Swanktrendz’s links/pages. Then came the next (current) problem.
Most of Swanktrendz’s articles are intact, however, there is a period of time (September/06 to January/07), in which very few articles survived. These, par usual, eloquent posts have been expelled to cyberspace’s Immense Black Hole of WWW Despair’; destined to forever float about in Internet Purgatory. This being the very same intangible home for our so-called ‘deleted’ emails (because nothing is ever truly deleted and some people have an odd, technological knack for recovering these “Dear Aunt Mae, my boil is growing rapidly’ trashed correspondence) which can be restored and reposted for all the world to enjoy. Except, of course, Swanktrendz’s posts for the block of time mentioned.
I could have just accepted the mishap, posted a notice saying, Whoops - we lost a whack of articles. Quite a shame as they were extremely well written with riveting topics.’ But, nooo. I am obsessed with recordingkeeping. I record everything, be it the weather, books I’ve read, movies I’ve seen, people’s birthdays (even people I am not close to!), etc. So, not only could I not let the lost articles fade off into the IBHofWD (see above for definition), but I also abhor the dreaded Error 404 - Page not Found directive. (If you ever want to be rid of email pen-pals, send them a dead link.) Every lost article link on Swanktrendz’s site gets a 404 message. There goes Swanktrendz’s immense audience! (I believe it was six at last count). So, I have set about searching my casual blog entries, (thank you tblog!) hoping to come across my milk-carton, missing ‘babies’. (And NO, I don’t have a back-up as that was the allure/drawing card of my host server.
As I was reading through old articles, I came across a former Swanktrendz contributor, Andrew Hoshkiw. Andrew is a fabulous writer, and an actual columnist for a newspaper up North (in the Yukon). However, (I’ m not sure how he will respond to this declaration), his photography skills surpass his written. This fellow takes pictures that I would be(more than),willing to shell out my hard-earned cash for. He has an incredible eye for his subjects and their surroundings. To appreciate his talent, you must visit the working link below, and share with me your opinion of this man’s photographs. I simply wanted to say that Andrew is still writing, away up North, and still producing fabulous art.
Image from www.hoshq.com/
http://www.hoshq.com/
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