My wonderful host Dreamhost announced a price increase recently after keeping the same rates for well over a decade. It finally moved me to make decisions I’ve been putting off for years.
In order to reduce costs I will eventually be moving my hosting account to a single website–this one right here–and retiring several that I created and maintained for many years. Primarily, this will affect my first website and online identity of over twenty years: audiblebeauty.net.
Quoting from “About Audible Beauty”:
I first learned and subsequently taught myself the rest of HTML many years ago, about 1995. It started largely with America Online and continued to a “Global Networking” class where I created a multi-page web site using only the DOS text editor. Years followed and I could never come up with a compelling enough idea for my own web site. Then, in 2000, I downloaded a couple clips of music from the forthcoming Gladiator. Using newly acquired editing software I whittled a few down to the essential theme and created my first sound events.
I was the most active on audiblebeauty.net from 2001 to 2006, when I simply ran out of available time. I added some new graphics and created a tableless (though not responsive) layout in 2010. Later I attempted a full design refresh but never finished it. As we have all moved to more sophisticated mobile devices with app stores, “event sounds” are not popular on desktop computers as they once were. Also, it was always going to be problematic to have anything to do with copyrighted material.
I most loved interacting with visitors on the forum, back in the day when forums were a thing. I fulfilled requests for specific quotes and discussed shared love in Lord of the Rings and Star Wars. The forum closed years ago (the underlying software no longer updating), but I still hope to save a copy somehow for the good memories.
The era of audiblebeauty.net is also when I discovered trailer music. I kept hearing interesting snippets of music in trailers which usually were not in the film score. Trailer production is its own domain in the film industry now, with dedicated composers and editors. It was great fun to investigate clips used in early Lord of the Rings trailers before Howard Shore’s score was complete. I had fifteen minutes of fame when sharing my results with the great fan site theonering.net. I also met other fans who shared information like Magpie.
I will save all the audio clips (I am an archivist after all) and the online identity for ‘audiblebeauty’ will probably still be around. Interests and technologies keep changing, leading to a new era in global networking.