Korat Farang Sites and Info in English

There are plenty of openly accessible forums, websites and blogs maintained by farangs (and Thais writing in English) about Korat available on the internet. A recent listing with the Alexa Ranks:

korat-info.com - #330.347 (#1.730 in Thailand) Forum, German lang. mainly

koratfart.com - #402.913 (#1.826 in Thailand) Forum

isaan.com - #1.723.171 (no regional ranking given) Website, Forum 


whatsonkorat.com  - #1.834.740  (#14.218 in Thailand) Website with Entertainment info 

2korat.com - #2.904.711 (no regional ranking given) Blog, Tourist Info

korat-forum.com - #5.617.789 (no regional ranking given) Forum

thekoratpost.c om - #4.555.935 (no regional ranking given) Website, News 

koratfarang.com - 6.225.795  (no regional ranking given) Forum still closed

koratmagazine.in.th - 7.904.617  (no regional ranking given) Website, Tourist Info

mgnewman.com - #8.657.006 (no regional ranking given) Website, Webcam... 

khaoyaiguide.com - #13.726.797 (no regional ranking given) Website 

koratfarang.wordpress.com - unranked (no regional ranking given) Blog (unlinked due to its owner's vandalism)

korat-weekends.blogspot.com - unranked (no regional ranking given) Foto-Blog

joelandchoom.net - unranked (no regional ranking given) Website, weatherst., webcam, blog...  


korat.info - unranked (no regional ranking given) News Blog (offline at present)

phimai.wordpress.com - unranked  (no regional ranking given) Blog (unlinked due to its owner's vandalism)

buadhai.blogspot.com - unranked (no regional ranking given) Blog

koratcity.blogspot.com - unranked (no regional ranking given) Blog 


Vandalfie's koratfart-info.blogspot.com unranked (no regional ranking given) Blog (unlinked due to its owner's vandalism)

koratguide.blogspot.com - unranked (no Thailand ranking given) Blog 

koratpostlovelygroup.blogspot.com - unranked (no regional ranking given) Blog

koratstories-by-me.blogspot.com - unranked (no regional ranking given)  Blog

nakhonratchasima-tour.blogspot.com - unranked (no regional ranking given) Blog

korat.asia - no rank (no regional ranking given) Blog

ontour-korat.blogspot.com -no rank (no regional ranking given) Blog

sites.korat.info (formerly koratfarang.blogspot.com - Subdomain not measured)  Blog

info.koratfart.com formerly koratfart.blogspot.com (Subdomain, not measured) Blog 

http://georgeanddragon.korat.info (Subdomain, not measured) Blog 

 korat.forum24.se no data (Subdomain, not measured) Swedish Korat forum

korat.wikia.com  no data (Subdomain, not measured) Wiki

wikitravel.org/nakhon_ratchasima no data (Subpage, not measured) Wiki

The Changing Farang Web of Korat

Internet is still something fairly new to those having settled in Korat for retirement. A few invest energy and work into setting up websites for hobby or even in the hope of making business of. But unfortunately age doesn't go well with new technologies and new forms of communication etc. Most of those ventures soon get to the point of running out of ideas and energy to keep going. Then those promising beginnings vanish from the web again like they had never existed.

Once in a while another venture with new ideas gets started. But since conquering the web is a longtime task, the question will be for how long that site is going to exist, before it vanishes like all the other information sites and blogs.  How can we make the web in Korat not forget, but keep the information for later "generations" of expats settling down here for their retirement? How can this information collected by various people in their personal blogs be kept? By collecting it in forums seems to me the most promising way.

Forums can be updated any time by new members, and old articles can be as interesting to read as new articles. It's just a question of keeping them clear of too much garbage posts. The problems new members face are integrating into a system already existent, broadening and perpetuating it. Old wisdom and young curiosity have to be combined. We can only hope that instead of opening a new website that might not last for very long like most of those before, the younger and still energetic newcomers do attempt first to perpetuate an already existent forum with their ideas, drive and new information, hope that the information collected and put in words by them does not get lost again to this idea of starting something new instead of building up on and perpetuating  what is already there.

Image credit: user ChrisK4u of http://www.flickriver.com

Webhost down

Once in a while it happens that technical problems occur in the data center where your sites are hosted. If you're a customer since years already, your webhost will try to comfort you as fast as possible. How fast that can be depends upon what is broken or malfunctioning. In the last few days I did receive error messages more often. The webhost always answered, they had already fixed it.

Well, can't tell whether they fixed it and something else has broken now, or whether they could not fix it. Fact remains that quite a lot of sites running over that web account are down, indicating connection problems to the database. What remains for me, is to hope they can fix it again soon, so all my sites are back online. I wouldn't dream of having to relocate my bigger sites to other hosts.

Having an alternative source of information for the members and readers of your forums running on another webhost, that is not likely to break down at the same time is always a good thing. There you can inform about the problems and what you might do to solve them, like setting up an alternative at another host etc.

If you use a separate host for your domains you might even have the possibility of redirecting the domain to the alternative site, where you set up a backup to keep your forums running.

But sometimes these host problems catch you at a bad moment, where you don't have a very recent backup at hand! And with the size of your site also the difficulty grew to keep everything backed up, like attachments etc.

A tough decision is, how long to wait for the webhost to sort things out, before you take things in your own hands and move to another host.