Apologies for this. It seems that when all Thom's .com sites were switched over to new servers on a new host, this forum tried to hitch along for the ride.

For the geeks among you it was a DNS error, and a feature of DNS errors is that sites can disappear and reappear at different times for different people, depending on where they are, as it can take a while for corrections to be propagated around the world.

I have to admit, I am pretty disappointed in the new site. Thom's excellent article on German Schools is now found at URL:

http://d7879.u22.greenesthost.com/index.php?option=com_...iew&id=152&Itemid=58

In the webmaster world that is what we call an "Ugly URL", which will make it hard in the social bookmarking department. Most sites strive for user-friendly URLs that get good search results. Those ugly URLs are going to hit you hard in the SEO department (Search Engine Optimization), because the URL will not rank so high in search results with so many geeky script variables. In addition, the old URLs are erroring when they should be forwarded to the new pages.

Hopefully they will get these problems worked out, but the problem is that search engines will remember those messy URLs further complicating future fixes. That is why you should never deploy until the URLs are ready for prime time.

Other than that, the site is much more readable than the old one, and the characters are rendering right (the old articles were barely readable and filled with error characters).

So what is the deal, Do we post here or on the New message boards on ThomHartmann.com?

I do not want even a ounce of my wisdom to be lost.

Thanks Gnarlie,

The urls should now be fixed.

Loganthor, keep posting here, please.