Passions in Poetry News

With Ron’s recent passing, many are wondering what will happen to the poetic legacy that Ron created through his websites and forums. One month ago, Ron was wondering that exact same thing, and he gave me permission to share with you, what follows.

Ron spoke to myself and my husband Rob (Ron’s friend and fellow programmer) in depth about the existing situation. Ron explained that time was of the essence. There were deadlines looming on multiple fronts regarding leased server issues, domain extensions, as well as pending coding modifications for the 3 poetry programs that were essentially 22 years old. As Ron said, “The problem is that a lot of this stuff is ‘in my head’ and we don’t have time to get it out.”

The hosting company, from which Ron leased his web server to house the many, many pages that made up Netpoets.com, 100-poems.com and Piptalk.com was discontinuing their Texas hosting service in September 2021. Without intervention, these 3 sites, among others, would simply expire and no longer exist. Ron was not concerned early on, and had been exploring various alternatives to transfer his extensive requirements to another hosting provider when unfortunately, his illness rapidly took center stage. This turned into a much more complex concern very quickly for Ron, and it required him to immediately rethink his overall plans.

Ron was the founder, the conscience and the heart of Netpoets, 100-poems and Piptalk. For over 22 years, he managed the daily supervision, maintenance and the hefty monthly costs required to keep these websites up and running year after year. Ron made it clear that he did not want to burden Rob and I with the management and costs associated to the existing scenario, and suggested that unless we could come up with an alternative solution together, then the simplest option would be to let all 3 websites ‘disappear’ in September.

I don’t think I need to explain how difficult these discussions were. We were talking about Ron’s life and Ron’s legacy in the midst of the raw, inevitable truths of life and what was to come. As you can imagine, these discussions became overwhelming at times, as they made Ron’s health issues heartbreakingly “real” for all of us.

After many hours of review, we agreed to work toward a goal of developing a read-only version of Netpoets.com, 100-poems.com and Piptalk.com. The intention was to make the existing content (poems, comments, posts and archives) available for future enjoyment online while maintaining the familiar look, feel and essence of Ron’s original web creations. Essentially, these 3 sites would look relatively the same as they do now, but they would no longer be interactive.

To accomplish this, Ron transferred the domains over to Rob and I, and we have since extended them by two years to ensure the domain names did not expire in the short term. Ron gave Rob access to the poetry sites to download the existing web content. Unfortunately, Ron became too ill to provide any additional off-line content or insights. In honor of Ron, Rob has continued to develop read-only versions of the 3 sites using the contents of the existing web site pages. We hope to have these sites available down the road before too long.

In the interim, please be advised that as of August 30, 2021 (just before the leased server expires), Netpoets.com, 100-poems.com and Piptalk.com will be temporarily unavailable. The content will be redirected to a new server and replaced with a “placeholder page (under-construction style page)” while Rob continues to work on the new read-only versions of all 3 sites.

Please ensure if you want to copy any of your poems or favorite threads, that you make copies before August 30. Our hope is that they will become available again down the road, however life has a way of changing our plans when we least expect it, so to be safe, please ensure you have copies for your own purposes.

Our goal is to continue to preserve these web sites for the foreseeable future in order to honor Ron and maintain a historic version for people to remember and appreciate the heart and soul that Ron and the poets poured into these sites.