13 November 2017

No, the Socceroo Realm is not disappearing! It’s evolving. Evolving with the times. Primarily that is with its format. Since its inception almost 20 years ago (yes, the Socceroo Realm will be 20 years old in March 2018!), it’s lived on my personal webspace allocated by my ISP at alphalink.com.au. That was the primary site. With the advent of mobile devices, a secondary site was setup a few years ago at wordpress.com. Part of this was to make it more readable on phones. Another part was for more visibility. The final part was for remote updating. On alphalink, I could only really update it at home. Coincidentally, I leave for Japan for holidays late on the night of Australia vs Honduras and possibly will miss the latter stages of the game. Any website update about our success (or demise) in qualifying will be done on the phone in Japan!

The event that started it all. My ticket to the fatal World Cup qualifier between Australia and Iran in 1997.

Then there’s the evolution in web technology. The Socceroo Realm started as a basic HTML site, and it still is a basic HTML site. There’s no java, no SQL, no PHP or ASP, no plugins, no database connections and no user interaction. It’s 100% static pages and the entire 20 years worth of blogging is spread over 110 pages and totals less that 4MB in data. To upgrade the site would require too much learning, and too much hassle. Almost certainly my ISP’s webspace wouldn’t offer all the tools required anyway, and the 20 MBs of space wouldn’t last long. Nor has it ever been viable to upgrade given it’s a 100% personal opinion site, not the news and information service that was part of its original premise. Since the primary reason for writing was fun, learning HTML was as far as I ever wanted to go. Besides, free editing software meant producing HTML pages weren’t much more complicated than creating a Word document.

Since the WordPress site came into existence, I’ve maintained both it and the alphalink site. Typically WordPress is updated first, and a few days later the content added to the alphalink site. My Twitter feed was embedded at alphalink so those that frequented the site could see the updates immediately, plus any spontaneous thoughts. In fact, being able to react instantaneously on Twitter has placed a greater premium on mobile access, and a lesser need for sitting behind a computer for a general, more formal, update. Although, football times have changed significantly over the years too. Whereby Australia’s time in Oceania meant the entire focus was on the intercontinental World Cup playoff every four years and the Confederations Cup and Youth tournaments during the interim period, these days, in Asia, there’s so many games that writing has become more focused on broader issues of the campaign, rather than the minutiae of each game.

Recently I moved house and ditched the old ISP for a new one. That means my alphalink webspace will soon die. So, too, will my email address of warrior@ that many readers have used over the years. Yes, the warrior is dead, long live the warrior! I actually resent losing that more than anything else, and I might even be one of the last people using the alphalink.com.au domain. The company has long disappeared, being subsumed by Chariot, which in turn is under TPG. How the charges have changed too. In 1997 it was $100 per year for a 33kbps connection on dial-up for 2 hours during peak time of 6pm to 11pm (or unlimited 3-hour blocks off peak) whereas in 2017 it’s $60 per month for unlimited ADSL2. While I could keep warrior@ for a small fee each year, again, mobile devices have made gmail and yahoo far more easier to use, and consequently nearly all email has transitioned away from alphalink already.

In preparation of this process, the socceroorealm.com domain now points to the WordPress site. I could even set up warrior@ email address at that domain if I wanted. The dilemma is the full site at alphalink. The scheduled termination of my alphalink connection is 22 November. Presumably that’s when the website dies. Whether it’s reprised somewhere else, who knows. At best, it reappears on a free-hosting service, and any updates would be giant ones after each major campaign or tournament. At worst, it disappears from cyberspace altogether, and as a compromise, I will feature regular “Blasts From The Past” of old posts on the WordPress site. After all, almost twenty years of Socceroo Realm history, it can’t be forgotten completely.

Whatever happens long term, all you need to remember is one thing: socceroorealm.com. That will always get you to the Socceroo Realm. On social media it’s twitter.com/socceroorealm and facebook.com/socceroorealm. If you want to preserve anything yourself, notably the six articles over the years covering the infamous Iran Game of 1997, feel free to copy anything. Easiest is to look under the Action and Blogs section on the alphalink site. Remember, 22 November 2017 is the day it’s likely to all disappear.