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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! |