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Post by tullpress on Aug 12, 2019 19:28:08 GMT
Hi all, For the past 15 years, www.tullpress.com has been hosted for free in the Netherlands, by a friend of a friend. I've been aware that the site has been down a lot of the time over recent years -- it's down right now, since February in fact, after a server change. Due to the freebie nature of the arrangement I haven't been able to do much about it. I've asked for information about when the site will be back up, but increasingly I get no answer. So I'm moving to a paid hosting service, and I'm currently updating the code on every page to make sure it conforms to proper HTML and CSS standards, before re-launching it. This may take a while -- there are a lot of HTML files to sort out. When it's back online I will add to this post. It will be continually available from then on. I've put too many hours into transcribing all this stuff and collecting rare material to see the site unavailable. Finally fed up enough to do something about it. Having just purchased the Minstrel box set, I see a lot of quotes have been taken from tullpress.com (various album reviews, 8 hours of BBC interviews from 1979 that I transcribed by hand by listening to & rewinding cassette tapes for months & months on end)-- none of which I got credit for. I guess someone else could have sourced these, but I've made them all available for cutting & pasting in seconds. I think it's worth getting this site back online. A
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Post by steelmonkey on Aug 12, 2019 19:35:49 GMT
I agree. Tullpress has been an absolute pillar of Tull universe.
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Post by tullpress on Aug 12, 2019 20:13:52 GMT
You wouldn't believe the amount of FAFF it takes to transfer web site hosting from A to B, though ... and I *work* in IT & databases.
I've been submitting support queries for the past 3 days to try and get it sorted out. God knows how your average punter does it.
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Post by tullpress on Aug 12, 2019 20:39:23 GMT
It is now back online, though I've only made a small start on what needs to be done.
I'm re-adding all the quotation marks to quotes -- which previously were just indicated by style elements , which, thinking about it after 15 years, wasn't the best approach for usability and reliability, and didn't actually reflect the original text either.
Adding quote marks to 350 articles is ... a tedious job. But my aim now is to future-proof it in some way.
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Post by tullpress on Aug 12, 2019 22:36:15 GMT
I've also just added stat-tracker code to every page -- thought it might be interesting to see what the most popular pages are, week on week. Not something I ever got round to before.
If the stats prove interesting enough I'll add regular info to the home page.
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Post by maddogfagin on Aug 13, 2019 6:47:51 GMT
Hi all, For the past 15 years, www.tullpress.com has been hosted for free in the Netherlands, by a friend of a friend. I've been aware that the site has been down a lot of the time over recent years -- it's down right now, since February in fact, after a server change. Due to the freebie nature of the arrangement I haven't been able to do much about it. I've asked for information about when the site will be back up, but increasingly I get no answer. So I'm moving to a paid hosting service, and I'm currently updating the code on every page to make sure it conforms to proper HTML and CSS standards, before re-launching it. This may take a while -- there are a lot of HTML files to sort out. When it's back online I will add to this post. It will be continually available from then on. I've put too many hours into transcribing all this stuff and collecting rare material to see the site unavailable. Finally fed up enough to do something about it. Having just purchased the Minstrel box set, I see a lot of quotes have been taken from tullpress.com (various album reviews, 8 hours of BBC interviews from 1979 that I transcribed by hand by listening to & rewinding cassette tapes for months & months on end)-- none of which I got credit for. I guess someone else could have sourced these, but I've made them all available for cutting & pasting in seconds. I think it's worth getting this site back online. A Andrew - glad you're back up and running. I've added Tullpress to the navigation bar at the top of the main page of the Forum as a quick link.
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Post by tullpress on Aug 13, 2019 11:39:50 GMT
Cheers!
Now I know a bit more about CSS coding I'll tweak things to make it more readable, e.g. by increasing the line spacing.
I did consider adding a full image pop-up/preview for all the thumbnails, but some of the pics are quite large and they'd take up most of the screen if you hovered over them.
It's not ideal having just thumbnails -- I often forget myself which photo is which, and have to open them to find out -- but it's a compromise, given the space they'd take up otherwise.
Happy to consider any suggestions re: site usability & functionality & navigation, to improve things where possible.
Also happy to hear about any browser-specific bugs or bad formatting, in case I can fix them.
The last major coding changes were made in 2005, so it's been a while and the web has moved on ...
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Post by tullpress on Aug 15, 2019 21:34:47 GMT
Re-vamp is nearly finished -- all article pages up to the end of 1979 have been updated, to improve layout of text and images. 1980 onwards still to do.
Also still to do: adding quote marks to post-1970 articles .. tidying up code of yearly index pages.
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Post by tullpress on Aug 16, 2019 14:25:12 GMT
That's the re-coding done.
The new Google search on the home page isn't returning all results yet (only two page results for 'Barriemore Barlow') --
I have a feeling Google is in the process of re-indexing the whole site again, page by page, after being down for most of this year.
I'll check the search functionality in a week or so.
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Post by steelmonkey on Aug 18, 2019 19:27:56 GMT
I'm going over to look around.
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Post by steelmonkey on Aug 18, 2019 19:29:46 GMT
Google is looking for $$...expect condom ads after visiting Passion Play information sites, cruise ship pops up from Far Alaska and diving vacations in Baja California after....well, you get the picture.
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Post by tullpress on Aug 20, 2019 9:54:26 GMT
This morning's task -- putting back the TullPress links to articles cited in the band's Wikipedia page.
I guess they were removed at some point, due to the links being broken.
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