Updating Our Just A Little Further Website

The old Nine of Cups website

We started updating our JALF website about … umm… a century or so ago, or so it seems. Yahoo Sitebuilder was our original Nine of Cups website host and website-building tool back in the early 2000s when we first started sailing. It was pretty basic, but it worked for our limited needs back then. As the web tools were updated and wifi became more accessible to us, we added more and more features and pages to the website… hundreds more, in fact. Until Yahoo stopped making updates and sold Sitebuilder to Abacos and though the tools were never enhanced, the annual subscription cost increased.

Pardon Our Dust!

Then Gentry took over, became our webmistress and created a whole new website on Squarespace in 2012. It was fresh and modern, had lots of cool tools, widgets and add-ons, and was easy to update. The annual fee was reasonable. We thought we’d spend a few months transferring the old nineofcups.com website pages to the new JustALittleFurther.com website, and then ditch Abacos. It turned out the ‘transfer’ was not so easy. There were 308 webpages to be updated and transferred! It required lots of time and an endless amount of text ‘cut and paste’ and searching for the original photos. It also required redirecting all the pages from the old site to the new site.

Since we were always working on the new website, documenting where we were rather than where we had been, the conversion always took a backseat. One year led to the next and we continued to pay Abacos and Squarespace with a yearly promise to ourselves that ‘this’ year would be the year to convert all the pages to the new (now not so new) JALF website. We’ve made annual, but minimal dents into the project, but never finished all those 308 pages that needed converting, editing or trashing. And then it was January 2024, more than a decade later, and it still was not done!

In early February, we received notice that Abacos sold the website hosting business to Turbify and another notice that price would increase again in March. Yikes? We got into high gear with a renewed effort and energy. This WAS the year we’d make the conversion happen. We’ve been working diligently to update to the JustALittleFurther website and, believe it or not, we’re just about done. There are a few odds and ends to clean up, but we’re feeling pretty good about it.

I might add that there has been a certain amount of pleasure in reviewing many of the old web pages. I find myself saying “Hey, David, do you remember this?” or “Did we really go there?” or “Did we do that?”. We look at the photos, read the texts and journals and relive the experiences all over again, reminiscing about people we met and sights we saw.

We’re hoping to make more improvements during the coming year, although when we leave for our summer road trip in May, daily blogs take precedence over website updates. If you get a chance, check out the new Australia page, for instance. Or maybe you’d just like to browse the Travelogue page and visit a country or area you’re curious about.