A brief Status Update - And A bit Of History...
Hey All, just a few notes:
I was given a copy of an entire poetry website by the previous owner. The site went offline in 2015, and it happens to be the first place I ever published a poem, starting in May of 2000. Yeah, I've been writing poetry for twenty years now. Kind of amazing.
The site was Lightverse.com - and I had 1.725 poems published on it by the time it hit the iceberg of hosting fees and joined the Titanic. Several poets I knew had many poems on there, including an old friend from high school in Madison, Wisconsin who brought me to the site in the first place. I guess you could say he's the reason I wound up becoming a poet, or at least why I found out that I was.
So the former owner gave me a backed-up copy of the entire website, as I was saying, about one year ago. Well, in the course of my past year's studies in IT, I have learned a very basic understanding of Windows web server, otherwise known as IIS. I have figured out how to make the web site partially run on my own PC, enough to recover the poems out of it. I will probably be at that for a few years. I've so far recovered one page out of 36 pages from the list of my poems.
So I spent this weekend hunting down an old Windows laptop that wasn't being used among my Madison people, and I got into the thing from here in California and spent about 14 hours wiping it clean, upgrading it from Windows 7 to Windows 10, installing IIS web server on it, and dropping a copy of Lightverse.com on it so it could be delivered to my old friend. He has no PC of his own, he's a street musician / busker in downtown Madison. He had been using the PC's at his church or the library.
Well, thanks to another Madison friend who donated the older laptop, the guy who got me started on poetry will be able to get his poems back from a dead site beginning tomorrow.
For my next trick, I want to see if I can start up a virtual live poetry venue for my area here in California. There is nothing here right now, it's literally the desert.
Don't be surprised if I invite some of you. Or all of you.
A little too tired to write more at the moment, but will soon.
Dan