Hello
Sorry that sausagenet.org and sausagenet.com have been gone for the last few days.  They are back up again at least  for now.  The short story is, that I finally had to stop paying for hosting and move it to somewhere that costs me less.  The site has cost me around £500/year to run over the last 10 years - so around £5000 in total.  I've made around £240/year from advertising from the 2 million or so hits a year that .COM gets, which helps, but doesn't cover anywhere near the costs of running the forum.

I'm going to have one last go at reviving the main site, embedding Youtube vids, so SN can be a place to come and watch old TV programs.  If it works, more people might come here, discuss more old memories, and it'll all get more interesting again.

Please feel free to contact me with any ideas you might have if you want to keep SN online.

---ian

Yes, this site has always had great potential, it would be nice to capitalize on that.

Have to say, I for one didn't realise that it cost so much to keep this place running  .


Best of luck with the revamp I@n.

Is there anything specifically we can do to help?  Do we need to follow advertising links on the main site, or visit the main site more frequently?

Or would a quick whip-round be more help?

Black_Widow wrote on Mar 16^th, 2010 at 9:26pm:


Oh no, thanks
This was never about the money for me - it was more about creating something that got on TV and Radio and was linked by as many other sites as possible.  As hobbies go, a couple of hudred quid a year is neither here nor there.

I get fibre broadband tomorrow - Basingstoke is one of the places in the UK that gets this first - so I can actually move the main site and the forum to a pc that can sit in my attic because I get 20mbit bandwidth (so don't need to pay for hosting at all any more)

You can definitely all help with the content though - that's the only thing that is going to bring people back to the forums.  Once I've done the new admin pages, we can all start adding Youtube vids on the main site and see if that drags people in.

I'm happy to accept any ideas about how you think the main site should look.  I can't decide whether just to repace the whole thing with pages of just Youtube vids for all the programs, or whether the thumnail pics still have any value?

Yes I agree the thumbnails are important - plus a lot of people went to a lot of trouble to get those pictures, it would be a shame if they were no more.

I am happy to help out in anyway possible. 

Ian wrote on Mar 16^th, 2010 at 11:45pm:


I have terrible problems with viewing embedded YouTube videos and there are plenty of places in the world with much slower internet than me, so surely a few simple pictures are worth keeping?

Plus I feel sure that particularly lovely pic of me on "Finders Keepers" is unavailable on YouTube (oh please tell me it is).

Calling in...

I too pop my head round the virtual door every so often, basically whenever I remember... but yes, when I leave it for a few months, come back and only see a few new messages of interest, it doesn't reel me back in...

Ian, I'm very glad to hear you're having another bash at the .com site - a few years back you set me up an account there and I added a few new progs - but I couldn't add pics, and only programme entries with pics triggered the "what's new / latest updates" section! Which didn't exactly make the site look dynamic Would love to see a revamp, then a group push for the 1,000 programme mark!

I agree that Facebook and similiar sites have picked up the baton for this sort of site - fan pages and communities specifically - I do miss the days when internet-based nostalgia meant running programme titles through AltaVista to find someone's Geocities page full of Times New Roman reminisces and, if you were lucky, some mono .WAVs of the end credit music... but, so long people want to freely discuss these things without being forced to tie their comments to their real identity, there will be a place for forums. The .com site, suitably upgraded, could be a traffic driver for the .org site.

I didn't post here massively often even back in the day, but all the regulars were quite lovely to me when I did. Maybe we'll talk more again soon