There are still loads of links out there for the old versions of the abc website address and I’m just putting up this message in the vain hope that people might correct them.
The correct address is now, and hopefully will be for many years to come, abcnotation.com.
Addresses you may encounter (and a brief history):
- http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc – for many years (from approximately 1995) this was the home of abc, part of my personal webspace at the University of Greenwich. It remained there until October 2006 when the University shut down all of the personal webpages on the site. Unfortunately, there are still hundreds of links to this page, none of which work.
- http://staffweb.cms.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc – this was the alternative address (kindly provided by the School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences) that I used from about August 2002 on, once I got wind of the fact that the University might want to shut down personal webpages on its own server. It is still live but now just has an automatic redirect to abcnotation.com.
- http://www.walshaw.plus.com/abc – in November 2006, after the changes mentioned above, I decided to move the website off the University’s servers entirely and put it here (as part of the webspace provided by my ISP). At the same time I took the opportunity to give the site a complete redesign, separating out the content into several pages and introducing the blue and gold theme it has today. Although I never intended this to be the official address of the abc website, many people have used it (because of the way web forwarding works) and there are still over 700 links to this URL. The address is still live but fortunately I have managed to configure it so that it does an automatic (301) redirect to abcnotation.com.
- http://abcnotation.org.uk – is a forwarding address I set up, also in November 2006, intended as being the new official address for the abc website (unfortunately abcnotation.com wasn’t available at the time). It is still live and takes you directly to abcnotation.com.
- abcnotation.com – some time in late 2008, my ISP temporarily shut down the site at walshaw.plus.com because it was using more bandwidth than I was allowed. Although, I was able to alleviate the problems, I decided then to move the site to a dedicated host. I also decided to overhaul the web-wide index (a list of all the abc tunes at various websites) at the same time and launch the abc tune search instead. The development work took me six months or so and the new site was launched on 21st June 2009 with 36,000 searchable tunes initially (this had already grown to 55,000 in the December 2009 edition).
Anyway, a long article for a short plea – if you do encounter a website with any of the old addresses (or if you run one yourself) please pester the webmaster to change them.
Thank you!
Chris
Tags: abc, abcnotation, site, Website, webspace