Brave New World

A long time ago, I put up a small web page for my mother-in-law to promote her rental log cabin in North Carolina. It was really just something to point people to who wanted to see the house, give some contact information and a few other things. Pretty basic HTML, hosted on her ISP site with a .../~name address. Pretty cumbersome if you had to type in the full URL, but most people were going to be coming to the site via links from Chamber of Commerce sites, local community sites, etc and she didn't want to really invest in things until she saw how things moved along.

Well, it's been 6 or 7 years without more than a few changes to the site -- more comments to her guestbook, a couple of price increases and links to other local attractions is about it.

Tonight I took the plunge. I registered a domain for her. A true www.com domain. I've still got to play a bunch to get that part all set up, but then the next step is to redo her page as well. I'm going to try to do this all in the background and surprise her (she has already said that she doesn't have the time to read this blog, so I'm safe there). I'm not changing the old site and in fact right now I'm forwarding the new domain to her old site so even that's transparent (as soon as it propagates). Not sure how things will come together, but at the very least it will give me something else to stuff my brain with and maybe an easier domain for her to hand out. Once the other domain "got out there" she didn't want to have to reprint business cards, change web referral sites, etc. This way it'll be gradual. She can take advantage of the benefits when she wants and not worry -- at least that's the intent.

We'll see where this goes...