ESSAY 24
THE PINK LADY WEBSITE: WHAT'S OLD IS NEW AGAIN
by Jeffrey C. Branch
In a way, it was symbolic that I launched the brand new version of the website in December, the month the site first debuted way back in 1998. Over the past two plus decades, the site had gone through more than a few changes here and there, most were subtle, and you’d never know anything had changed. But in this instance, the entire site, as you have seen, has been considerable changed, hopefully, for the better. Allow me explain.
It all began a year and a half ago when I upgraded the operating system of my Apple iMac desktop computer. The OS was changing to 64-bit architecture, but, Freeway from Softpress, the software I used to create and maintain the website for well over a decade, perhaps even longer than that was only 32-bit architecture, which led to mild problems. After the OS upgrade, the software had become sluggish and occasionally unresponsive, sometimes, it froze, but, not always, sometimes, it worked as smoothly as it always had before the upgrade, however, other times, it completely seized up, the thing was, I never knew when I’d have problems and when I didn’t. Needless to say, that made doing my monthly upgrades frustrating. Several months ago, around January 2021, the company that made the software I used announced that a 64-bit upgrade of the program was in the pipeline, but, it was a Beta version, meaning it was basically a test version, not a finished product, that concerned me more than a little, thinking I wasn’t sure I could use a Beta version for the website, so, I went about looking for alternatives to what I was using.
In June of 2021, I came across Everweb after doing an extensive online search. The program was advertised as 64-bit architecture, tailor made for iMac machines and the latest OS upgrades. After doing more research and the program and all the things it could do, I decided to take the plunge and purchased the software, costing all of $79.99. Once I uploaded the program onto my machine, it was then that I got something of an unpleasant surprise: there was no means of being able to upload the files from the website into the new program, that meant I would have to recreate the website from scratch. Uh-oh. For anyone who’s visited the site, you know there’s a whole lot of pages, somewhere around 550 to date, and it wasn’t just the pages, it’s the text, captions and pictures that were on said pages. Here I was, faced with what I envisioned as a near insurmountable task while using a brand new program to boot, so, in late July, I buckled down and begun the task. Fortunately, the learning curve with Everweb wasn’t as steep as I thought, in fact, there were similarities between this and Freeway that helped me get off to the flying start I certainly needed.
What made the daunting task of the rebuild easier was the ability to copy and paste text directly from the website onto pages in Everweb, and doing drag and drop with pictures into the new program, from there, all I had to do was position pictures the way I wanted, formatted text and included any and all links from page to page. Much to my surprise, that once daunting task of recreating the 500 plus pages which I originally thought would take as long as five or six months only took three, finishing that part of the job in early October. From there, it was a matter of going over all the pages and checking them to make sure they looked the way I wanted them to look, and I think I’m quite proud of how things look with the new version. As with everything regarding the Pink Lady website, nothing I did wasn’t work in the traditional sense of the word, but a labor of love, both for myself and for you, the fans of Mie and Kei, and this was no different, if anything, recreating the website from the ground up turned out to have been both challenging…and fun! So, if you have any time, take a spin around the site and let me know what you think of the new version.