Well, its good to be back after a six week absence from regular participation in this forum. Unfortunately, real life took over with a couple of unplanned events that required my undivided attention. They are now behind me, and I have a fair bit of catching up to do.

First the big news - Lansing Heritage is about to move. For the past three and a half years, the site has been hosted by the commercial service http://www.becamation.com. Overall, it has been a good experience. However, it represented the single greatest cost of running this site and I was always fighting storage and bandwidth caps that limited our growth. This is now about to change. Thanks to John Nebel, and his company CSD Internet, Lansing Heritage has been given a new home at no cost and with ample room to grow. Feel free to let John know what you think of his gesture. I can't say enough positive things.

I have tentatively scheduled a physical move for the evening of November 26, 2003. With the exception of the forum, the web pages have already been set up on CSD's servers. What has to happen next is to transfer the name servers for our domain to CSD. At that time, I'll move the forum.

Without going any further into tech speak, this means that all of the servers on the internet have to be informed that Lansing Heritage is now at a new location. I have been told that this takes around 24hrs. During that period, you could be directed to the old or new site depending on how fast your internet provider updates. To prevent loss of posts in our forum during the transition, I will close down the Becamation hosted forum just before I initiate the name transfer and open the CSD forum at approximately the same time. During the 24hrs of name confusion, I will put up a redirect at the Becamation forum page that will allow you to go to the new forum even if your ISP directed you to the old one.

After the 24 transition period, there should be no noticeable change in how Lansing Heritage looks or operates. If it hasn't been clear, at no time will there be a change in the address you type in to reach our site. We will continue to be at http://www.audioheritage.org and http://www.lansingheritage.org for the Library. Only the underlying IP address will change to reflect the new location. If you have bookmarked or added our site to your “Favorites” list, there is no need to edit them. They will continue to work for the new server.

The only other turmoil you might see will be during the transfer of the forum. Past experience indicates that I can do this in as little as a half hour if there are no problems. During that time, the forum will be completely inaccessible, either at the Becamation site or the new CSD site. I’ll do this portion of the move at an off peak time to minimze the disruption. However, there is the chance that it could take longer, so don’t be surprised accessing our forum results in a “Closed” message for an hour or two on the evening of the 26th.

Time for an update on the pledge drive. Thanks to your help, the pledge drive was a resounding success. Approximately $2,300 was raised during the drive. This completely eliminated our accumulated debt and will allow me to upgrade the software I use to author this site.

I have updated the Financial Contributors page and accounting spreadsheet to reflect the results of this drive. You can take a look at the links below. I have already contacted some of you by email or PM to express my personal thanks. I will continue with this and contact everyone that has contributed by the end of this week.

http://www.audioheritage.org/html/ou.../financial.htm

http://www.audioheritage.org/html/in...site-costs.htm

That’s it for now, I will post status updates as needed over the next 48 hrs.