As of today mesalek.com and all its sites, including Highways of Colorado, have been discontinued. :-( It had been two years since I had made any serious effort at updating it, and I cannot justify the cost of hosting it anymore given other commitments in my life.
The site had been up in some form since 1997, so it's been a good run. Thanks for all the visits and information exchanged over the years.
Is it possible you could "pass the torch" to someone else? Although I've never heard of your site, I'd be interested in learning more about the history of Colorado's Highways. Closer to home, I really enjoy Chris Bessert's Wisconsin Highways and Michigan Highways websites.
Wayback Machine, anybody?
Bummer Matt, but I understand. I went to your site a lot for recent Colorado updates to AARoads, as you had a lot of good content and research. Thanks for your work over the years.
I see its down already as I post. If I had known about it, I would have checked it out more. Sorry that you have to give it up, as I know its a pain to upkeep even my flickr account. I have tens of thousands of photos I have taken over the past ten years since I went all digital, I have not yet tackled as I only do one or two a day. Last week I had time and I posted a lot of photos from around Lake Wales, FL and some in Vero Beach, but that is rare that I post more than five at one given moment.
Thanks Matt for a great webpage. You and I started out around the same time with road-based webpages, and I was so excited when we figured out that you'd cover Colorado and I'd cover Wyoming. I could only wish my Wyoming coverage back in those early days was in the same league as your Colorado coverage. What you put together was terrific and exemplary. (It also helped that the state of Colorado had better resources such as state highway logs that were comparably easy to follow and understand!)
I am sad to see your page go. But, I don't think AARoads would be what it is today without collaboration and discussion way back in the early days of developing road-based webpages. Thank you for your partnership and collaboration.
Oh, man ... i was in the Highways of Colorado website just the other day. i've been there previously, but I wandered through for a refresher. I wanted to say that I thoroughly enjoyed my visits there (as well as to Colorado!), and I am very sorry to see it go.
:-(
Quote from: roadguy2 on June 13, 2017, 05:35:22 PM
Wayback Machine, anybody?
The more recent coverage by the Wayback Machine. https://web.archive.org/web/20170529115036/http://mesalek.com/
Quote from: andy3175 on June 15, 2017, 12:51:43 AM
What you put together was terrific and exemplary.
Agreed. Yours was one of the best state highway sites out there, and it outlasted many similar ones for other states. I'm glad the folks at archive.org have preserved your material, but accessing it through that channel isn't the same. This is very sad news, although I totally understand not being able to justify the cost. Thanks for all your work over the years, and for sharing it online!
The Colorado site inspired a couple road trips to Colorado to cover some of the back roads. So thanks for the coverage.
I can definitely relate to the time and effort involved in maintaining and updating web sites (http://dfwfreeways.com/ (http://dfwfreeways.com/), http://houstonfreeways.com/ (http://houstonfreeways.com/))
Those of us who operate web sites know the effort involved, and know that the effort is just not sustainable if you have other things going on in your life.
The cost of web hosting is low, so for anyone with any financial means the cost of hosting should be a non-issue. I actually use four hosts for my sites to spread out content. Hosting is around $100 per year per host, although you can find deals for less.
It's the time required for updates that becomes prohibitive. Processing and posting even a single page of photos (10-20) takes multiple hours for me. So I've minimized updates to just a few per year.
Hate to see it go but completely understand ... Thanks Matt for the time and effort you put into a great website!