Cash Gorman pages moved!

Good news! I spent most of yesterday moving my website to a new location. It's now it's own domain name. For greater connectivity to this blog and divesting myself of the copyrighted Cash Gorman name it's www.herogoggles.com.

If you aren't aware of it, the whole thing started when I was writing a little fanfic for a long defunct site. As the stories were taking place pre-1941, I started researching heroes and villains that would have been available. I had quite a few different books (Steranko's guide, Jeff Rovin's Superhero Encyclopedia) and there were a few websites that had been started up reprinting GA comics. Before long, I realized I had in my hands a document some 50 pages long concerning GA superheroes, some pulp but mostly from the comics. A document that was the most complete of its kind anywhere at the time. What to do, what to do?

I had no web-building experience and was thinking about teaching myself and creating a site. Then, lo and behold, Jess Nevins launched his websites, one of which was a GA Superhero one. He had some info I didn't and I had some that he didn't but otherwise we obviously scoured many of the same sources. He had no interest in doing anything about the villains though. So, I went back to my sources and research and my GA Super-Villain site was born. Over the years it morphed. My intent was to cover the public domain characters. And, I found out that some companies' stories weren't public domain (Street & Smith kept up with their copyrights very well it seems) and other companies were that I wouldn't have thought of (Quality, MLJ, quite a bit of Fawcett). When the Terra Obscura mini-series was being written, I was contacted by the writer for some Princess Pantha information, so I scanned a comic to send him and, once I had the scans, well, on the web-site they went. Jess slowed down the updating of his sites, and I had almost double the information that I had originally as well as coming across quite a bit of misinformation, so I expanded the site to include the heroes as well. At this point, it's only a matter of time before I include embrace whole heartedly the DC and Timely characters as well.

Then a month ago, Geocities, where I hosted my pages, closed its doors except for the premium services. However, when I started, I knew I wanted more than what a free site would allow so I had gotten a Plus account. In all the notices, Plus account members would be able to upgrade their account at no extra charge as well as getting re-direct pages. Sounded cool and I was busy with other stuff so I thought I'd take the easy way out. Except when it closed, they had no record of me being a Plus member! This is the second time I had to use Yahoo/Geocities customer service and it pretty much sucks. They reserve the phone numbers for only paying members and even then it's a difficult search to find. If you aren't a paying member, you have to resort to email, you may get a reply later that day. Trading emails with them at one-a-day, about a week passes, the issue still wasn't solved (they liked to answer questions I wasn't asking as opposed to the ones that I was) and I was told that the period for upgrading had passed by that point so it was a moot point. In other words, they really didn't care at making me a happy customer or keeping me as one. I was involved with some other projects so I just didn't worry about it too much.

Got caught up enough that I decided to bite the bullet and looked for another web-host. I noticed FatCow rated high on one site and looking into them, they seemed the most price efficient with the most bells and whistles including features to allow my site to grow further such as putting the information into a database and creating dynamic pages. Imagine wanting all of the Black Terror's villains and the list is generated for you! But, that's a ways off. As I was updating and uploading all of the information I ran into a small glitch. FatCow is up front with phone numbers and emails for technical service as well as instant live chat on the computer! Within minutes, problem was solved, less time it took me to even find contact information for Yahoo/Geocities. And, the company has gone green and is wind-powered. How cool is that?

So, the site is up, most of the links are repaired and working, I've re-tooled the look some and simplified some hierarchy. More work needs to be done in unifying the look across the pages, but it's Thanksgiving week, so I'll be off the computer soon, spending time with family. But, tool around the site some, let me know what you think and what you'd like to see in the future.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. And, if you're going to be on the road, drive safe and get home safely.