Changes are coming!

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Big changes are coming to the Monterey Peninsula Toy Box. Our old AOL address, with the hard to remember URL of http://hometown.aol.com/toylandmry will soon be giving way to an easy to remember address. Actually, we have an official domain name but it hasn't been publicized much. I am the proud owner of www.montereypeninsula.info, which has pointed to the AOL servers for a couple of years.

AOL's free hosting has served me well for eleven years, but it's time to grow up. Or at least enter puberty (hey, I'm only 11!) The Toy Box will soon be moving to a "real" hosting service. Your old bookmarks to the AOL addresses will no longer be valid.

I'm doing this in the hopes that this labor of love might provide some modest financial reward. AOL has always placed banner ads across the top of my pages. I figure if there's gonna be ads, I should get a piece of the revenue. So it's time to move.

So I'm going commercial. It is my intention to present ad content that is relevant to my readers. I hope to offer links to places where you can buy books about our area, movies made here, places to make lodging reservations, and that sort of thing. Not big banner ads for Classmates.com which are only relevant to AOL.

Note, however, I will not be accepting ads or payments from local businesses directly. I fully intend to remain free from the corrupting influence of anyone who might have a financial stake in my site's content. My job as webmaster is to provide an unvarnished look at the Monterey Peninsula, not one that is sanitized by the local tourism industry.

To keep enjoying access to the Toy Box, update your bookmarks to the address www.montereypeninsula.info. Do it now. Until the move takes place, that address will still take you to the old site. Once the new site is up and running, it will automatically take you to our new home.

Just to reassure you, the content will still be the same old junk, with one exception. The Hatton Canyon Freeway pages will be taken off. The information there isa little dated, and most of it is no longer relevant. I am, however, thinking about adding a page to the history section to tell the story of how Carmel slayed the evil Hatton Canyon Freeway dragon.

This journal will also likely move, but not right away. I've never been too pleased with AOL's design options, which are very linited. Eventually, I hope to have a Mental Notes journal that matches the design of the rest of the Toy Box. But that is a fairly low priority, and it may take awhile.

So remember, WWW.MONTEREYPENINSULA.INFO. Not dot com, not dot net, but dot info, for information about our favorite place.

Addendum, October 10, 2008: This entry was originally posted on the old AOL Journals. My AOL archive has since been merged with the new Mental Notes on Blogger.

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