The time has come to say goodbye

I have occupied this GeoCities space for seven years this September. It's with a heavy heart that I depart for greener pastures, but it is time that I move to a service that completely meets my needs. I am very sad that under Yahoo's ownership (what an appropriate name for that group of people, but I digress) GeoCities web tools have deteriorated to the point where I struggle more with them than I do the actual web design itself. Note the garbled text at the bottom of this page -- it is appended to everything one uploads so one has to go back by hand and edit it out. Further, if you upload more than one item at a time the Upload Utility sees them as one so you're often left with your HTML file with dozens of lines of random text at the bottom representing the content of your graphic file. Annoying isn't the word to describe it, though it comes close.

With the required Yahoo bashing out of the way, I have to say I am grateful for the years of solid service GeoCities provided. I was receiving 3-4K hits per day during peak school months and GeoCities recognized this by increasing my storage space to 50 MB. This was back when having 5 MB was considered a "step up" from the base service, so I was thrilled. The GeoCities team also took great care in encouraging a community atmosphere in all the various virtual neighborhoods. I knew most of the people on my block and we were all to happy to lend each other a helping hand. We pointed out new and interesting information or music and helped each other with graphics when we were in need. It was a terrific time. Probably for this reason alone I won't entirely discard this site.

I would, however, like to invite you to the new host I've secured. As some of you may know, I recently suffered a horrific hard drive crash. I lost so much information and work, much of which I valued more than my Mozart site (if you can believe that). So all that's left are the pages I uploaded here in a futile (tedious, tiresome, irritating) attempt to put content back on this site with the infamous Yahoo! Upload Utility. I've moved them over to the new host, killed all of the links to pages lost from the HD crash and cleaned up the HTML a bit.

I do still have a fair amount of information in the form of notes, books, postcards and photocopies of Mozart-related items people have sent me over the years, so the site will be reborn. I've also forged relationships with the SF Symphony (among others) who have offered to provide their comprehensive program notes to this site free of charge. In addition, I'll have the flexibility (courtesy of 2 GB of storage space) to host tons more media, whether it's audio clips, streaming video or PDF's of scanned material. The future for The Mozart Experience is as bright as ever.

Please visit the new host and bookmark it!