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.

What'll become of the Korat sites with those lots of new gTLDs ahead?

ICANN is putting a huge number of new generic and special top level domains on the web this and next year. Almost any word that has found some significance on the web in the past two decades will be used as a domain ending, like .link, .blog, .forum, .mail, .news etc. In my opinion this will change the internet drastically.  Websites with long domain names will lose their significance, subdomains almost become irrelevant,

 And the .com domain, that  used to be the master and top demanded for ages now will lose its importance slowly. More focus will be on the signifying word after the dot. Domain speculation that had lost its profitability over the years will pop up again - until the next round of new domains where you'll be able to get a TLD for even the remotest village, not just those like .amsterdam, .barcelona, .berlin, .london, .madrid, .moscow, .miami, .nyc, .paris, .sydney, .wien, .roma, .tokyo etc. A .korat to my knowledge hasn't been planned yet, neither is a .bangkok in sight, but it is probably just a question of time.

What will become of the numerous .coms then with korat-this and korat-that before the dot?

Honestly, I can't tell right now. Highly developed sites will probably not lose any or much of their status, they just might get a load of fresh competitors. But as Google favors those with the longer known domain and content, they might still be as important as before. That is, if they had gained some importance already.

The sun will rise for .date on April 1, 2014, and others like .wed for individuals with the necessity of their own domain for the wedding photos etc. will be available even before that. With the .memorial domain I suppose one can set himself a gravestone in the virtual cemetery. And I can also imagine what.dating, .party or .love will be for.

Presently in the Sunrise Phase is .buzz. Now I wonder who'll grab "korat.buzz"?