Goodbye GeoCities and Thanks

Yesterday was October 26, 2009 and this was supposed to be the last day that my GeoCities site will be accessible because, today, GeoCities will be closing forever.  I'd been gearing up for this day ever since I first read about GeoCities' impending closure around June of this year.

It was extremely disturbing for me since, not only was my GeoCities site ranked highly for a few search terms in Google but any page linked to it would also rank highly in search results of Google and, given my situation at work, it seemed that I wouldn't have the time to look for an alternate site and implement forwarding so that the new site will be listed in search engines instead of the GeoCities site.  Doing this would preserve my website's ranking in search results.

However, good thing I found the time when I resigned from my job.  I took the opportunity of having more time to develop my websites and my primary goals were to move my main website from GeoCities to SourceForge and preserve its search engine ranking and what is commonly called, "link juice".

Linksys WRT54G v7 Piece of Crap Router

I sometimes wonder why, of all the WRT54G router models my family could have gotten as our home broadband router, we ended up with the only version that used an Atheros chipset that is unsupported by any alternative firmware - DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato, etc., instead of the more common Broadcom chipset which is widely supported.  Not only does it limit the possibilities we could eventually perform with the router, it also limits its resale value.
     

This WRT54G version 7 model is a piece of crap which Linksys should never have produced.  It seems Linksys has learned its lesson, and has since brought out later models only with the Broadcom chipset.

   

Problem with WRT54G v7 Router and Broadband Connection

We've been having issues with our router and/or shared broadband connection here at home for the past few days.  My first thought was that P2P downloading from two machines on our home network were eating up bandwidth and causing the browsing slowdown or connection failures on other machines.  A symptom of this would be the inability to connect to the web admin interface of the router.  In the past few days, many of us in my family who depend on web access to do our work, were frustrated and had a very difficult time in completing our jobs.

Since my wife urgently needed unhindered, continuous, and stable web access, I had to block all TCP/UDP ports above the list of well-known ports which are between 0 and 1023.  That includes most ephemereal ports.  I blocked TCP/UDP ports 1025 to 65535 on our Linksys WRT54G v7 wireless router which still had the default firmware of 7.00.0.  This allowed most of us who relied on the web to be able to continue with our work uninterrupted.

The problem was that my brother, who pays for our Internet connection, owned one of the machines that was doing the downloading.  I could not block ports 1025 to 65535 permanently.  Another reason why I felt that blocking the ports permanently was not a good solution, was that, at some point in the future, I was also going to be doing some P2P downloading.

A Daunting but Hopeful Start of a New Journey

It's the 1st of September, 2009 and I've just completed the Saved Content homepage and setup my first blog, The Official Saved Content Blog, which will soon be hosted at blog.savedcontent.com, after DNS changes have been replicated.  Right now, it's hosted at savedcontent.blogspot.com.

   

I am offically starting to push the Saved Content website and the Saved Content Blog during a turbulent time in my life.  I am currently unemployed after I resigned due to stress at a large multinational corporation. 

    

I am also encountering many obstacles and pressures, first and foremost, from my spouse, who has oftentimes in the past, doubted and questioned my ability to successfully complete any of the endeavors I've initiated.  She has good reason to believe this due to our past experiences.  However, failures should not stop people from attempting new ventures.  

     

Although my spouse feels this is a waste of time and does not believe in or supports this undertaking, I will endeavor to succeed no matter what.  My vision for the Saved Content website is presented below.
   

The raison d'être of the Saved Content website, is to serve and preserve useful content in order to provide relevant information and advertising that will aid web surfers in supplementing their knowledge, forming their decisions, fulfilling their needs, and guiding them to their eventual destinations or goals.