Website off-line for some time

[John Cornelisse]

Maybe not all of us might have noticed it...

But this very website was off-line for some time.

Email to David Hughes was not answered, nor could I find any message about what had caused this all.

I even thought that David might have had some serious accident or even worse... I looked around the internet whether David Hughes could have passed away... There are however many David with the same family-name.

I even feared for some time that this website was lost for ever for all of us.

My age is almost 70, and I guess many of us are in the same category.... 

Therefore the next questions:

1) Why was the website off-line ?
2) How is this website organized and maintained?
3) How many people have a copy of the archive and the database ?
4) How can we keep all this on the website preserved for the future ?

Who can explain this all, and how can we prevent this is the future ?

Please please let us know.

[Dave Hughes]

Hi John, Sorry I didn't reply to your email, we've had a bereavement, so I've been a bit busy.

The account was temporarily suspended over an unpaid invoice of £61. They sent the reminder to an email I no longer use, despite me advising of the new one. The account is now paid.

Currently the site is backed up, but accessible only by me. It would make sense to make a public version of the backup available.

Many of the stories that appear on this site also appear in print in "Printers Tales" which is advertised on this site. I think the book is one of this site's greatest achievements, recording the memories of a diminishing group of craftsmen. Some contributors to the book are, sadly, no longer with us, but their memories of the print industry live on.

The vulnerable part is the many pages of photographs, most of which I only have in low-res web-ready versions.

Traffic to the site has taken a huge nosedive in recent times, mainly due to the coding of the site not being mobile-friendly or responsive in design. Sites which are not particularly mobile-friendly suffer in Google search placements.

The site's photo pages are .shtml files and the navigation is by server-side includes. They are linked to an external style sheet and are CSS coded.

If there is anyone out there who could assist in the re-coding of the pages to make a more mobile-friendly responsive design, then that would help to ensure that this site survives.

[Keri Szafir]

Hi,
I guess we could do what everyone else does and move on to Wordpress with Bootstrap .
When I find some time, I'll gladly help - I've got some experience in networking, open source software administration and programming (Python and an occasional "hello world" in C ), but none in web development, Javascript, PHP etc.
Fortunately, the framework is very popular and has a huge users/developers community, so finding recipes and troubleshooting shouldn't be a problem.

[Dave Hughes]

Thanks for your excellent suggestion Christopher and kind offer of help.

I liked the sound of Wordpress, big fan of open source.

The migration is now complete, and I'm pleased with the results, and hope everyone else is.

The site, is gradually getting more traffic from search engines and I'm publicising it on social media.

I would like to ask everyone a little favour to help re-establish the site, and publicise the upgrade. If you have a following on any social media please consider sharing your favourite Metal Type page (perhaps one that you contributed) using the buttons underneath.

Buttons include Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, as well as good old email.

Thanks in anticipation.

[Mechanic]

Dave I have been sharing your Metal Type tweets on face book. I have had feed back that indicated that visitors to  Metal Type think that the new home page is much better than it was.

[Dave Hughes]

Thanks George, all help appreciated.

The new layout means that the site looks great on desktop, tablet or mobile.