After 9/11 I added "God's Problem" by Helen Graebner to the Potpourri page. I also added a link on the Home page to donate to the Red Cross.
October 2001
Diane changes jobs after the hotel in which she was working has to lay off a large number of employees due to current events. Diane immediately accepts a job as a receptionist in a private country club.
November 2001
Diane offered a promotion in her new job to Manager and also becomes the Administrative Assistant to the Club's Director.
Site hosting is moved from the free 2itb server to a free server with the ISP Directvinternet.com
Diane moved from Florida to South Carolina to become Administrative Assistant in a new Golf and Country Club in Bluffton, SC. The Clubhouse Director for whom she worked in Florida had gone to work at that club and needed an Assistant.
Helen moved from Cleveland, OH to Rapid City, SD to be near her daughter Judy.
The site moved from a free server to its permanent home at www.generations-poetry.com thanks to an early Christmas gift from Diane's brother Jeff!
The Flash introduction was removed from the site for maintenance.
The site earns the title of "Featured Poet of the Month" from Poetry in a Cup!
July 2003
Helen Graebner celebrates her 91st birthday!
The Meet the Poets page is updated for Helen's birthday, Diane & Helen's relocation, and to add links to websites explaining some of the information in the biographies.
November 2003
Andrew Robert Graebner is born to Diane's brother Jeff and his wife Ilene! New photos of baby Andrew are immediately placed on the Photo Album page - Diane isn't a proud aunt at all, is she?
After a long period of not working on the site, the Volunteers page is added to the Meet the Poets page to showcase some of the organizations that are important to Helen & Diane
Added a Cafepress Gift Shop to begin selling items featuring Helen & Diane's poetry as a way to help offset the cost of hosting and editing the site.
Also began taking donations via PayPal on the Home page to help defray costs
Joined Bards of Fortune literary site competition and added a new Awards page.
Added a news page through a CGI host to begin to keep visitors updated on changes to the site and to let everyone know about important Graebner events
February 2004
Helen is hospitalized after experiencing chest pains. Surgery is performed and Helen is sent home. Several days later, she experiences more pain. The doctors perform an additional procedure to correct the problem. It is decided that Helen's current condition makes it necessary for her to live in a more managed care facility, and Helen moves into a nursing home in Rapid City, SD.
For reasons known only to Diane, she suddenly is inspired to make major changes to the site! The Flash Introduction is repaired and replaced, and the decision to convert the site to CSS is made. Unfortunately, Diane knows NOTHING about CSS, so her education on the subject begins!
Added new navigation menu and buttons to main pages and new graphic "Back" button to poetry pages.
Changed animated GIF on Christmas page to a photo of Helen with Santa.
March 2004
Diane finally feels confident enough to convert the site to CSS. It receives a whole makeover, with new styles and layout on many of the pages. Although no one should notice a huge difference, you should notice that the site just overall LOOKS better!
The CGI news page is canceled, and this page is added!
An invisible stat counter is put in place of the visible counter on the Home page to allow us to see how our visitors find us, and what we can do to improve the site for them. The Privacy Statement is updated to reflect the change in how cookies are used.
Temporarily removed link to Bards of Fortune competition as the group is taking a much needed Spring Break!
Added a handful of pictures to the Photo Album.
Added a fifth Award Page for current awards won!
Added Trust Worthy Website Certification to the Memberships and Affiliations page.
Removed page transitions from the entire site in an effort to make them load faster. A word about the transitions; I like them even though in some circles they are considered bad web coding. That's why they stayed in the site for as long as they did.
Fixed the navigation again to make it more consistent.
I fixed some pesky (and stupid) coding errors and began the task of validating the HTML and CSS on the entire site. I also placed some of the JavaScript in external files.
On a trip to visit Helen in South Dakota, my parents stumbled upon a baby book with pictures and what may very well be Helen's first poem! The Potpourri Page was therefore rearranged to add the new treasures. The page also includes a link to the original, handwritten poem!
May 2004
New photo albums have been installed on the Photo Album Page. The album had become quite messy, was completely out of order, and relied too heavily on JavaScript so it wasn't very browser friendly. Now there are links to three albums, one for Helen Graebner, one for Diane Graebner, and a third one which is a general Family Album.
August 2004
On August 12, 2004, Helen Graebner passed away. She had recently celebrated her 92 birthday. A new memorial page was added to the site (View the Memorial) and the Biography was changed. I wrote a poem entitled The Book to memorialize my Grandmother and added it to the memorial page and the home page.
September 2004
Diane leaves South Carolina and moves back to Orlando, FL. She takes a part time job at Universal Studios, but is quickly promoted to the Human Resources Department as Coordinator for their Learning and Development team.
Removed the link to the Bards of Fortune School of Shakespeare competition since that site was no longer active. Also removed the link to purchase the "Tribute to Mom" book since it is no longer available for sale.
Moved the Tribute to Helen from the index page to a separate page with a link from the home page, and renamed the Home page to make it the entry page into the site.
Diane changes jobs again, this time choosing to transfer from the HR Department at Universal Studios to the brand new Blue Man Group show performing there! She takes a position as Administrative Assistant.
A blog is added to the site. Due to being busy at work, Diane totally neglects to add a link to the blog to the main website so no one but she knows anything about it!
After watching the 2008 election, and the subsequent arguing in the months that followed about how long it was taking the new President, Barack Obama, to initiate the "change" he had promised in his campaign, Diane writes a poem entitled Change is Hard about how slow the process of change really is. The poem is posted on the blog since Diane hasn't the time to update the website.
October 2009
Diane's dog P.T. Barnum passes away at the age of 18. Diane writes a tribute poem called Heaven's Park and posts it on the blog.
After being diagnosed with a large tumor in her liver, Diane's dog Charity passes away peacefully in her sleep from a heart attack after a wonderful morning of squirrel-chasing. Diane is saddened by the loss, but relieved that Charity didn't suffer.
Diane manages to go a whole 24-hours in a dog-free household, and on the very next day goes to the Orlando Animal Control Center just to "get a doggy fix." She adopts Isabella, a 4-year-old rat terrier who had been found in an abandoned home while police were serving an eviction. After several weeks of waiting for Animal Control to attempt to notify Isabella's previous owners that their dog had been confiscated (with no luck in finding them) Issy comes home to live with Diane!
April 2011
The house is strangely too quiet with only one rambunctuous, hyperactive dog, so Diane visits Animal Control again "just to see what they have." She adopts Ike, a 7-year-old smooth fox terrier who was found wandering the side of the road. Ike and Issy adore each other, and procede to take over the house!
Hello again, all! It's been awhile since I worked on the site, and I'm not sure what inspired the sudden need to play around with it again, but here we are!
Deleted a bunch of pages that contained only dead links, were outdated, no longer chic, or just cluttered up the site. These included the Awards pages, the Affiliations and Memberships page, and Links to Other Poetry Sites.
Removed links to our spam-filled Guestbook from the Home page and replaced with more modern links urging people to follow Diane on Facebook and Twitter. Happy 21st Century everyone!
Cleaned up a lot of CSS and HTML code, and brought the site back up to standards. Cleaned up links that were dead or outdated, and generally just spruced up.
Due to a new user agreement that Diane wasn't fond of, the Cafepress store had pretty much gone into disrepair. Changed the link to a new Zazzle store, and updated all of the page links to reflect that change. The store has no products currently, so it isn't much use!
Fixed the What's New page (this page!) to reflect some of the vanished links and pages. Removed links to things that no longer exist on the site (like the guestbook, etc.).
After Helen's death, a folder of her writing had found it's way to Diane's Aunt Judy (Helen's daughter). Aunt Judy sent it to Diane who finally manages to go through it. It contains a bunch of treasures which Diane will add to the site in the next few weeks/months! (These treasures include original hand written copies of some of Helen's poems on the site, a few short stories, and some long-lost poems!)
Added some text to the Home page so it better reflects what the site includes.
Found an Interview with Helen Graebner in a file at home. It was a writing assignment from 1980 when I was in High School and it really gave some insight into Helen's beliefs. Added it to the Home page.
Added a Lightbox image effect to the site on some pages and uploaded some original handwritten versions of some of Grandmother's poems to their corresponding pages.
Thanks for viewing our site! I hope you'll keep coming back to see what's new and different!
