Alara.net
| Archive | |
|---|---|
| Name: | Alara.net |
| Date(s): | 1996-2006 |
| Archivist: | Alara Rogers |
| Founder: | Alara Rogers |
| Type: | Fanfiction, Fansite |
| Fandom: | X-Men, Star Trek, Pokémon, Gatchaman, Blake's 7, Farscape |
| URL: | Alara.net |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Alara.net, aka "Alara's Happy Happy Text Only Site", is an archive maintained by Alara Rogers, a longtime fanwriter and archivist The site hosts many archives, which contain links to hundreds of fics, both Alara's own and those written by others which she wanted to keep somewhere accessible.
History
The site was initially called Aleph Press (after the fanzine and webzine publishing company Alara had intended to run[1]) and the reference to it as a fanfiction host appeared on the ACFF newsgroup on July 16, 1996[2]. At the time, the site was an ftp hosted at netcom.com. In April 1997, Alara announced the creation of her archive at mindspring.com, which was comprised of a main page, the original version of her Magneto page (aka Alara's Rather Sad Magneto Page) and her Doom Patrol page[3]. In September 1998, Alara announced an update to her Magneto page, which included new links to Dreamhost[4], although Aleph Press remained at mindspring.com. Her next update post to acff, in December 1998 provided Dreamhost links to her Magneto, Charles and Mystique pages, as well as Aleph Press[5].
Alara.net Web Server
In June 2000, Alara's ACFF posts[6] directed readers to her Magneto archive at alara.net, her personal domain and the archive expanded in size and scope. As she stated in her introduction on the main page, the archive was unlike many other at the time, being formatted in plain text without the images, animations, frame and MIDI files that characterised other archives[7].
Current Archive
Sometime between February 12, 2005[8] and July 12, 2005[9] (per the Wayback Machines page captures), the site went down when Alara closed her domain. She returned to Dreamhost, which is where the archive remains. The archive is still plain text, but makes up for that in breadth of content.
Yomigaere! Alara.netVisitors to this site will notice a big change. It's up! This is certainly a big change from down, I think we can all agree.
I got out of the providing web space business entirely. I no longer have my own web server. Instead I returned to my origins, and I'm back with Dreamhost, mainly because I like their TOS and they're cheap. So some of the sites I once had up are gone until I am able to get them back up, such as Shifting Sands. It's going to be a bit more work to put that one back than it was to do this site.
By now most of you know the drill. I don't like pictures, or cascading style sheets, or pretty Javascript mouseovers. I mean, okay, I do like them, they're kinda pretty. But I'm not an artist, nor do I play one on TV, and I've got no interest in redoing my site as anything other than text-only. I do intend to put up some dynamic content before long; this web server lets me run MySQL and PHP, so now I have to teach myself those, having come from the Microsoft world of SQL Server and ASP (and Cold Fusion, which I had to learn for work.) For now, though, this site remains happily text-only and static.
The title, by the way, is cheesy Japanese for "Come back to life, Alara.net!"
The archive has been static since January 2006 and is no longer being actively updated.
Contents
- Comics
- Star Trek
- Farscape
- Random Fic Fandoms
- General Alara Stuff
- The Aleph Press Page - Once upon a time, I intended to publish fanzines, and the name of that publishing venture would have been "Aleph Press". Today that name is shorthand for "all my stuff".
- Alara's Collection O' Sigs- My collection of sigs is an assortment of pithy political statements that I agree with, and which reflect my political views. Includes the story of my famous "First they came for the hackers" quote, which, yes, I wrote, not Anonymous or Unknown.
- The AlaraFic Mailing List - Get all my fanfic (and original fic that will never otherwise be released on the net) at your one-stop shop. Click on the link for information or to join. Or go to Alara's Writing Livejournal instead, since it serves the same purpose and I'll probably be phasing out the mailing list.
- Alara's Livejournal: This is about as personal as I get on the Internet. I talk about writing, fanfic, dreams, books, politics, and occasionally rant about life sucking.
- Alara's Archive Livejournal: Yes, I have more than one of them. This one's all about this very archive! Imagine that. News about this archive will generally appear on this livejournal before it appears anywhere else.
- Alara's Writing Livejournal: This one is where I post my actual writing, since the lengthy downtime of this site convinced me I can't put all my eggs in one basket anymore. I intend eventually to have everything I've ever written there, including stuff that isn't fanfic. To see the original (non-fanfic) fic, you have to ask to be friended. It's locked to protect my ability to publish these works someday.
- Alara on Fanfiction.net: My author page on the infamous auto-archive Fanfiction.net. I was one of the early adopters, so despite the fact that the majority of fanfic there sucks, I still post nearly everything I write there, usually before it makes it onto these pages.
- Alara's Daily Kos: My posts to the Democratic blog Daily Kos. I haven't been nearly as active there since the election as I was once.
This section appeared on the earlier incarnation of the website but was removed/redistributed in later versions:
Other People's Pages of Interest (notes by Alara)
- Judith Proctor's Blake's 7 Page: There isn't a lot of B7 presence on the net; here's a great page that ties what there is all together and offers a lot of fanzine reviews and ordering information.
- The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5: A comprehensive, semi-official B5 site.
- Lori's Gatchaman Page: The most comprehensive Gatchaman fanfic archive on the net, run by Lori McDonald.
- CFAN: The Comics Fan Fiction Authors Network: A comprehensive index to comics-related fanfic, run by Kielle.
- Web Pages That Suck: I love this site! It's basically an illustrated collection of "Thou Shalt Not's" for web page design. Since I'm a cranky dino, I get very irate with web pages that suck. Here's how not to make a web page that sucks!
- Notes from Underwater: He ain't pretentious, he's my brother. :-)
Sub-Pages
Due to the size of the archive and its proliferation in smaller sub-sites, details about content appear in the subpages:
References
- ^ Aleph Press Fanzines, alara.net
- ^ REPOST: dOOm pATrOl: Wheels Within Wheels 1b/3 (so far), acff at googlegroups, July 16, 1996.
- ^ An Archive Announcement, acff at googlegroups, April 27, 1997
- ^ META: Updated the Magneto page, acff at googlegroups, Sep 10/98
- ^ META: Fanfic archive updates, acff at googlegroups, December 28/98
- ^ [MAGNETO, JOSEPH] Notes: Twin Poles: Journeyman of Magnetism, acff at googlegroups, June 12/00.
- ^ A dinosaur to the last, Alara defies all current Internet trends by creating a text-only page, via Wayback, March 2/01.
- ^ Alara joins the 21st century, but still not with keen graphics, via Wayback, Feb 12/05
- ^ Yomigaere! Alara.net, via Wayback, Jul 12/05
- ^ Alara.net - Alara's Happy Happy Mostly Text Web Site(Via Wayback, Jul 28/05)