www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall A Suggestion to Avoid Internet Aggravation & Disappointment

Just a bit of advice to those who, like me, have a "Favorites" list that's crammed with the URLs of websites from A to Z, each forging a vital link to a treasured info source. It happened again yesterday. I went to one, looking for a point of info that I wanted to double-check before answering someone's query and, lo and behold, "Page Not Found" was the only info I got for my trouble.

The page I sought was, like many others, a single page of text that reposed on someone's website, probably because it once fit their interests. Since, space became an issue or, as othertimes happens, the website itself is gone.

So, my advice? If there's a document out there that you really rely on, are really interested in, or just enjoy, copy it and save it to your hard drive, in My Documents (or wherever) as a .txt file. As long as you don't republish it, there should be no copyright issues. (Sites that don't want you copying will generally have locked you out from being able to do so.)

(Remember too that even large sites make changes or disappear; it's not always the little guy. Right now, the Forum archives and lets us search for any of our posts, no matter how trivial; suppose space became an issue here - as it almost inevitably will at some point. Suddenly, I might find myself unable to retrieve a post by Yuhannon from 11/03, which included the text of a great article on the Ethiopian Liturgy. I'll be taking my own advice and copying that one.)

Anyway, that's my words of wisdom. In the instance that prompted me to write this, I think I'm in luck. I know who the author of the document is and I'm going to e-mail him and hope to retrieve a copy. In the past, that hasn't always been the case - but it took me until now to figure out how to avoid it happening.

(Now, if everybody posts that they've been doing this right along, I'm gonna feel awfully dumb. I won't say I've never done it before, but not consistently or with real purpose.)

Many years,

Neil

Dear Neil:

How about:

"I've been doing it for some but, because of laziness on my part and of time constraints, I keep on forgetting to follow them through!"

Onset of my own "senior moment" and you are WISER than me, if not most of us!

AmdG

When I read the subject I thought the post would say something along the lines of "Stay off the Internet!"

Aggravation and disappointment is something all of us deal with in our daily lives, not just on the Internet. We cannot help how we feel. It is how we deal with those feelings that matters.

I'm go programing guru, but perhaps the forum could install an "are you sure you want to post this" box before something goes in.

Clicking "post" once is hard enough (I know I've started to write a post and then deleted it) - but maybe having to do so a second time would give the good persons within all of us a chance to come out when aggravation might otherwise be getting the best of us.

Just my humble thoughts.

Yours,

hal

Hal,

Not exactly the issue I was on about, but not a bad idea at all. (To say nothing of the ultimate solution, as proposed by KO63AP )

Many years,

Neil