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| Damn. W and I are buying all kinds of computer crap so we can rebuild a new computer (it’s going to kick ass) but then I realized something today—something terrible. I was thinking about what a pisser it is that we lost all the stuff we had saved on the other computer. I was thinking about the hundreds of hours I’d spent on writing articles, responses to articles, and things debunking websites (religious/creationism) I’d found. I was upset about it because I had dozens of them, things I hadn’t published to my site or sent to the owner of another site. This is what I get for putting things off, I suppose. But then I realized something that was worse than all that: my favorite places. Over the past three years I have been meticulously gathering and organizing the best sites I could find on the Internet. The last time I counted, I had nearly 1,000 working links (go through and delete dead links every three or four months). The last time I counted was about nine months ago. When my computer died and went to hell, there’s no doubt in my mind I had well over 1,000 of the best atheist, freethought, political (with democrat slant), evolution, and debunking sites available in English. I’m hurt. The loss of this list is devastating. Here’s what I’ve learned about good sites: they aren’t always easy to find. Some of the best sides I had I stumbled upon by clicking a long chain of links from one site to another. For some reason, a person or persons will spend a great deal of time and effort creating a wonderful website, only to realize that he or she doesn’t know how to get a good ranking on a search engine. It took me a long time to get my site where it is with the keywords most used to find it, so I had no advice to give to these folks. It doesn’t matter, the thing is that I’ve lost them—forever. I’ll recover some of them, probably most of them. Still, I know it’ll take years to build a list of that quality again. Sure, I could spend an hour a day for two or three weeks and probably have just as many sites in my new favorite list, but I wouldn’t have the same sites. It’s upsetting. Hmph! |