We've moved and stuff

April 25, 2006

Article Text

Welcome to Jammer's new home at JammersReviews.com. As they used to say back in the day, update your links and bookmarks.

After seven years hosted as part of the Trek Nation network, I have parted ways with Christian Sparborth, the owner of what seems like an ever-growing network of TV-related sites. (In addition to Trek, he now runs popular websites and forums for CSI and Desperate Housewives.) The parting of our ways was my idea, and it was amicable. I will still be maintaining links to TrekToday, which is still the best Trek news resource out there.

For me, it was a matter of pragmatism. When I moved my site to Trek Nation's realm back in the spring of 1999, it was first and foremost for reasons of bandwidth; my father's hosting provider at the time (where I was piggybacking) said I was using too much bandwidth and wanted to charge him some outrageous amount of money ($200 a month, I think) if I kept using that bandwidth. That was highway robbery, so I went on a brief search for a new home, and Christian coincidentally was starting up the Trek Nation and asked me if I wanted on board for the purposes of cross-promoting our sites — not to mention free web hosting on his servers.

It was a good fit, and it served me well for a long time. I thank Christian for extending that invitation and supporting my site over the years. I also congratulate him on the apparent success he's had. I say "apparent," because I can only guess at his level of business success (although I assume it must be reasonably good). I don't actually know, because I don't actually know Christian at all personally, and have only talked to him via e-mail maybe two or three dozen times in seven years. Hard to believe, but true. Unless my FTP was down, we didn't cross paths much at all. Welcome to the Internet, where you can have long-standing agreements with strangers and somehow, over the years, amicably remain strangers.

In the years since, Christian's network has (apparently) become a relative powerhouse as niche publications go. I'm still just a minor-league niche publication and don't see that changing, which is okay with me. But over the past few months I've also been thinking about ways I can improve this site in terms of technology and underlying structure. I wanted to open my options to working more with PHP and MySQL (you'll note that all the pages are already PHP-based, though I don't do much with it as of yet). Also, I needed more direct and available technical support (Christian is in the Netherlands and a very difficult man to reach), and basically I wanted to pull full webmaster duty, with more direct control to configure my hosting environment. These days, web hosting fees are ridiculously cheap and give you 10 or 20 times more bandwidth than you'll ever need. It simply made sense to make the move now.

With this move also comes the official change of this site's name to simply "Jammer's Reviews." For reasons of potential legal liability, I've always been slightly uneasy using "Star Trek" in the site's title. Finally, that issue has been addressed. "Jammer's Reviews" also better describes the site, because I review more than just Trek, even though Trek is (and always will be) the heart of the content.

The old domain name, st-hypertext.com, still works and will continue to do so, probably forever. I wanted to make the transition as seamless as possible, so all the existing links to my site out there on the Internet will continue to work. But I'm deeming st-hypertext.com officially unofficial as of now, and it's my intention to phase it out as much as possible. Hopefully that's not a wrong-headed marketing decision. Then again, this site doesn't have a marketing department, so you can't blame them. I guess you can just blame me. After all, it's my name on the site.

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1 comment on this post

    im really late to this website but thank you for all the posts, you havnt posted in forever and probably wont see this but thank you for being my after episode go to website every time

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