When AOL started moving toward a more advertising-oriented module, I noticed a couple things I didn't like about the way it was handling Web pages. Pictures and links frequently didn't work for no reason, only to pop back up as if they'd never been gone without me having to do anything. Sessions would time out when I tried to access my space sometimes. And it started putting ads on e-mail and on actual Web pages sometimes, so I decided it was time for my own domain anyway. I purchased swankivy.com in early 2007 and slowly began moving files there.

Nearly two years later, only the most important things had been moved: Negative One, the writing page, the photos, and some of the personal pages. Maybe about 30% of Budgiland. I was going slowly because I didn't want to just pick everything up and plop it down elsewhere; I wanted to redesign it, rewrite it, expand it, and give it a facelift. But then I got the news that I had thirty days to clear out.

If I hadn't already begun to move my stuff, this would have inspired panic, but my plan is to basically create a skeleton of the unmoved pages and have links to the old content on my new site just until I have time to build them and rewrite them how I want.

What I am MOST disappointed in is that I will no longer have "this page has moved; change your links and bookmarks!" holder pages to stand where thousands have undoubtedly linked over the last ten years. I'm sure plenty of people will click links to my site, receive a 404 because the link leads to an AOL page, and then shrug and move on. How often do you try to find out if the dead page might actually be up somewhere by searching for its keywords?

I'm going to lose a ton of my audience.

I hope you guys will follow me to swankivy.com without too much trouble, and I'm very sorry for the inconvenience.