Recent Changes to
the
Fairbanks, Alaska Information Site
Alaska Time & Temp:
You may want to bookmark this page and check it
occasionally.
August 18, 2009
We are in the process of separating the Ranch Motel from this site. It
will be set up at
TheRanchMotel.com, but the two sites will still have many links in
common. The change is due to excessive calls to the Ranch about the
website - the staff does not have time to answer questions about the site,
only about the motel. So by separating the two, perhaps the questions
about Fairbanks and the website will go to the right place, which would be
thewebmaster at fairbanks-alaska.com instead of to the Ranch staff. Thank
you in advance for your cooperation and patience while we make this
change.
June 14, 2007
We have had little time to record our changes here in the last 5
years, but the newest merits mention. Because of heavy traffic, we have
had to move our site to a server with greater bandwidth. To help pay for
this, we have begun to offer paid links and pages, but are keeping the
price very low, as we are not trying to make money, just pay the
maintenance on the site. We will continue to offer free updates to
non-profits, like
churches, but will be charging $5 a YEAR for approved links to
businesses, on the appropriate page of the site. If you would like a whole
page dedicated to your business, we can do that too.
Just email us (email at bottom of page) and tell us what you have in mind.
For more details and prices, see our FAQ page. We do have a few restrictions. For example, hotels, bed and breakfasts, and motels are not eligible. We
also reserve the right to refuse or remove pages or links to businesses we
do not feel represent Fairbanks in the best light. In the future, we may
gradually remove unpaid pages and links.
October 21, 2002
We have just added a lot of restaurants to our
restaurant page, including many
that are located downtown. We do not have a lot to say about some of
them; when we get a chance, we will add more. We have coded them for
whether there is a chance of enjoying some music there, and a star
indicates a downtown location.
At the suggestion of a visitor, we have updated our page on
car rentals, deleting one that
went out of business and adding quite a few new ones. All phone numbers
have been corrected with the newest phone book, with the assumption made
that it is accurate!
Several of our museum pages have been
updated as well, as their hours of operation have changed.
June 8, 2002
We have been trying to update our many event calendars. Also updated
were our page on the Tanana
Valley Fair as well as the schedule for
Golden Days. More to come! Please
note, when looking at event calendars, dates highlighted in yellow -
these are old dates kept just so you would know what might be happening
- they just have not told us the exact dates for this year yet.
We finally got a schedule for
Golden Days in July. The date was set, everyone planned trips to be
here then, and then the Chamber of Commerce had second thoughts and
changed the dates! We will not bother those with NetMind again, but
there will be some more changes and updates soon, so check back.
March 21, 2002
We have added a page on the Tanana Chief,
a fairly new attraction, but one that promises to be a major addition.
It is a sternwheeler like the Riverboat Discovery, but you have a choice.
You can go on a sightseeing only cruise, or enjoy a full meal at the
same time - breakfast, lunch, or dinner.
We also updated the education page with the
Spring schedule of community
interest courses.
Friday, February 8, 2002
We have made some minor corrections to pages since September. We are
particularly happy to note more and more people contacting us directly
about updates to their information, especially on the
church page.
We have added to
our page on the Dalton Highway, and updated a lot of the event
calendars. Around the first week in March, we expect to be busy updating
a lot more for our spring visitors.
We just added a link on our home
page to Working Guidebook, the beginnings of
a page of links for those who want to explore farther. Right now, most
of them are not annotated, but often the link explains itself.
Last, but
not least, we updated our new community
class page with the late winter classes.
Friday, September 7, 2001
In the last two months we have added three new pages. Two more on
the World Eskimo-Indian Olympics (one on the history
of the events, and one describing the different events).
Sorry, no photos yet. These pages are linked to our main W.E.I.O.
page.
We also added a page of info on community classes offered in the
local after school program. Lots of interesting things there. Check it
out on this page.
Saturday, July 7, 2001
We have been searching out and deleting or correcting broken links
on our site - quite a job for a large site. While we were at it, we
updated our Golden Days Schedules
and the Tanana Valley Fair
pages. Most of our event calendars also saw updates, though that is
slow work, and a long way from finished!
Saturday, February 1, 2001
Our February event calendars
have been updated with lots of new events. We also added a few new
pages this month - one on the Fairbanks
Winter Carnival, and one on the Festival
of Native Arts, both held in March. You will notice that some
of the buttons are now links. We are trying them out to see if they
help with download times. Let our webmaster know what you think.
Monday, January 1, 2001 - Happy New Years!
We have added a link for the local movie theatre to several pages: On
a Shoestring under "Enjoy a Play or Movie" and on our Attractions
page. All dog mushing schedules
are up to date now, and we are beginning work on others. Our section
on transportation is
growing. We have added a
page on Alaska Direct Bus Lines.
On our index page, we added a link to a new book just out on gardening
in Alaska - enjoy!
Thursday, November 1, 2000
This time we received updates from other sites, including such popular ones as Sun Dog Express (dog
mushing), Gold
Dredge 8, and the Riverboat Discovery. Only the first of these is open right now. The Riverboat page has new
photos we took this summer. We also have corrected our link to Santa Claus House, which recently moved their website to
their own domain name. They are open year 'round. Gold Dredge 8 tells us they expect to have a site up by early next year.
Thursday, October 19, 2000
Nothing but calendar updates this week. All event calendars (except Golden Days) have been updated, including our dog
mushing schedules. You can reach all calendars from the main event page (link at start of this paragraph). The Arts/Drama
calendar now includes ALL the bazaars we were able to find (months of October through December). Of course, if the event was over by the time we got to the
update, it may not have been added.
Tuesday, August 29, 2000
Our calendars have been updated as much as we are able through November. We spent a lot of time updating the
November/December Christmas Bazaars, which have all been moved to our Arts/Drama Calendar. We are beginning to
include participation information for locals who want to have a table at a bazaar.
Our page for Manley Hot Springs has been updated and a photo of the Roadhouse added..
In early July, we added a page for KJNP, a non-profit 50,000 watt AM and a 25,000 watt FM gospel radio
station and 18,000 Watt gospel TV station on Channel 4. The powerful AM station reaches
literally across the "top of the globe," reaching
thousands of listeners with the Good
News of Jesus Christ. Free tours of this
all-volunteer gospel station are given weekdays at 9 a.m. The financially struggling
station begun in 1956 is wholly supported by donations.
In mid July, we added a page on Tolovana Hot Springs,
one of our true winter attractions (though it is open other
times as well.) We discovered a website for the Yukon 800
Riverboat Race and added a link to it to our page.
For nearly three weeks we have been unable to update our
web, and some of the buttons have been broken. In addition,
we just discovered that our e-mail was down, as well.
Everything has been fixed, as far as we can tell. We tried
to disable this page while the problems were being solved,
to avoid irritating those using NetMinder. We apologize
for any inconvenience.
Friday, June 1, 2000
We thought we better alert you to the fact that some event
dates have changed. For example, both the Yukon Quest canoe
race and their gold raffle have been moved from June to
July. You can find more information on our Events Calendar, under
July. Other events, such as the Poker Flat tours
have been updated as well. We are sorry that the dates
beyond July are so incomplete, but we cannot update what the
organizations involved have not yet updated!
We had a chance to go on the Riverboat Discovery
cruise this week, so will be updating that page with new
photographs and information.
Sunday, May 14, 2000
And a Happy Mother's Day to you too! We have become aware
of a problem with our JavaScript redirects from our old
site, and have just added manual redirects for those without
java enabled.
We earlier updated our Sports
Calendar with lots of schedules for May (unfortunately,
the "powers that be" with each sport only update
THEIR lists once a month, so we cannot fix ours as far ahead
as we would like) and added a page for Softball.
Someone objected to our simplistic explanation of
permafrost on the Vocabulary
page, so we added a page explaining permafrost in more depth.
We just added a link to most of our pages that will make
it easier to add our site to your favorites. It only works
with recent Internet Explorer browsers, but if you use
Netscape it should at least give you a reminder to bookmark
the site. The address that will be added to favorites is the
home page, so if you want a different specific page within
the site, you will have to use your own browser's
"favorites" button.
Monday, May 1, 2000
We have added a page of Alaska
News Sources with links to all the newspaper web sites
that we could find in Alaska. We have been updating our
calendars again, especially the Arts/Drama and Music/Dance ones through
June. We have also worked on our historic pages, adding Gold Rush History to add
more background information on the discovery of gold in
Fairbanks.
Saturday, April 22, 2000
This week saw JavaScript redirects added to all our old
site's pages (except the home page), as we continued our
move to this domain name. We cannot erase the old site until
we are indexed well at the new site, but we did not want
anyone to miss out on additions and upgrades we are doing on
the new site.
We continue to update our meta tags, which will make our
search engine work much more efficiently.
We have noticed a steady surge in visitors viewing our Alaska Highway page, and we
always have seen a lot of interest in the map pages. So today
we added information on the US Customs inspection
station at the Alaska border with Canada. The same
information was added to the Tok Junction page (Tok is pronounced to rhyme with "poke") which
we also expanded and updated this week.
Also updated is the Alaska
Marine Highway page, with more information and links to
schedules.
Today we also worked on the Native Villages page,
adding information for Barrow, and so much information on
Nome that we had to make a separate page for Nome.
Friday, April 14, 2000
Today we opened our site at our new address, Fairbanks-Alaska.com
(with or without the capitals and with or without the www.)
We are still redesigning pages to render better in Netscape
Navigator, and changing to our updated style sheet, so you
will find problem pages for awhile yet. All future
updates will be done to this web, although the old site will
be left up for awhile to allow people to get the new site bookmarked
or added to their favorites.
Saturday, February 12, 2000
Today we added a search box to most of our
pages, to give you one more way to find things on our site. It
will also let us know what people want that we do not have, so
we can add them. So come back later and you may find that what
you had been looking for has been added! Once again, our
calendars have been updated, as far as we can go anyway. Some
event sponsors do not yet have their new dates set, and some
we are still unable to reach.
Sunday, January 23, 2000
We have been busy updating our Events Calendars.
They are not finished, as we have been unable to reach some groups to get their updates,
but we have decided to put them up anyway, so you will be able to plan better. The most
important summer dates are there, anyway, including Golden
Days (at least all the dates the Chamber of Commerce gave us). Again, our
calendar got so long we had to separate out a Dog
Mushing calendar, though major events are still on the main one as well.
If you do not find an updated event that you need for your planning, feel free
to e-mail our webmaster,
and we will put it on the top of the list and get the information to you by e-mail now,
and on the website later.
We also are busy renaming pages. You might want to check any that you have
book marked. For now, if you do, and go to it, you will find a message and a link sending
you to the new page. To see an example, click here.
Saturday, November 20, 1999
Our page on the Alaska Highway was been updated with links to more information,
including one to a calculator you can use to find the distance from Fairbanks to points on
the Alaska Highway.
We have added a page of font information which can be reached from
here, or from our Frequently Asked
Questions page, which has also been updated. The FAQ page (as well as our
home page) includes a link to a site where you can download
free fonts especially made for the web.
At the request of a visitor, we have added a link to our
transportation page that you can follow to can get a
report on Alaska road conditions.
Saturday, June 19, 1999
Finally we have had the time to update Water
Adventures. We included a new page of contact information for Fairbanks
fishing and fishing charter businesses. There have been
some additions and changes to our various calendar pages as well.
Under Transportation, the page for
the Parks Highway Express has been updated
with rates and schedules for 1999. Parks Highway rates rose a little, but Richardson
Highway dropped a lot.
We have added a page for the Tanana Valley Fair,
and updated our Calendar through August, and our
Music/Dance page through July. Items not yet
updated are in boldface, with 1998 dates.
Monday, April 19, 1999
Due to a customer request, we have added a page of car rental information linked to our
Transportation page. Where possible, we included toll
free numbers for your convenience.
Monday, April 12, 1999
A phone number has been added to our Aurora
page, that can be used for up-to-date Northern Lights forecasts.
A new page gives information on winter trails
for skiing, snowmobiling, and mushing.
Monday, February 22, 1999
This month we crashed our web and lost numerous buttons. We are in the middle
of a major upgrade, so if you find our pages are not very consistent
(bold type on one
page, not on another, etc.) it is because we are attempting to optimize our pages to look
good in any browser with any resolution that a visitor might be using.
Please have patience with us - we know that some of our pages are out of date
for the 1999 summer season, but many activity operators have not posted their changes yet.
We will get them up as soon as possible.
Monday, February 1, 1999
We have just uploaded our German Language page
on the motel, and are working on one in Japanese. We used an Internet translator, since we
do not know German, so if you do, and we have errors, please let us know via e-mail.
Anyone out there want to translate Japanese?
We have been busy at work updating the Calendar of Events for 1999. You still
need to be careful to note the year, as many 1999 dates are not yet set, and we left the
information from 1998 so you would have an idea as to what might be happening. Especially
note any plays - the same groups may have productions in 1999, but of course they will be
different ones than noted for 1998.
If you find some pages changing in format, it is because we are updating our
design gradually, a few pages at a time. That is also why you may find some different
headers or footers - the new ones are there, but will not show up on a page that has not
been visited, updated, and re-uploaded.
Monday, December 21, 1998
Our pages on North Pole and
Santa Claus House have been updated
with pictures and links to a history of the two places.
Our Calendar of Events page has been
updated through January 1999. We are still working on the Index of Annual Events.
Monday, November 2, 1998
One of the "Ohio Eskimos" has written a summary of their trip by
motorcycle up the Alaska Highway, and a link to it has been added to the
Alaska Highway page.
Wednesday, September 9, 1998
Donna Gilbert, Manager of the Ranch Motel, is running for Fairbanks
City Mayor. A temporary link to her campaign web site was added to the
top border, next to "Ranch Motel".
Friday, September 4, 1998
We have added the Trip Diary of the Ohio Eskimos
to our Alaska Highway page. We hope you enjoy
reading about the adventures of a group of 11 senior citizens who rode the Alaska Highway
on Honda Gold Wings the summer of 1998.
Monday, July 13, 1998:
More information and detailed directions to the Poker
Flats Research Range for their free tour has been added.
Comprehensive links to all historic buildings and sites on this web has been
added to Historic Preservation.
The Map of Fairbanks page now has three
maps, one a pdf file to download and read with Acrobat Reader, one in html format with a
way to get a free hard copy, and one on the page itself. The broken link to the pdf file
has been repaired. A map link has also been added to the North
Pole page.
Thanks to the generosity of Julie Coghill, many
photos have been added to pages throughout the site, and many more are to come. They are
too numerous to list here, so you will just have to surf for them.
Some labels have been added to the Map of Fairbanks.
If you followed Airport Road (where Alaskaland is located) on farther left (off the map),
you would come to the Airport. You will notice the the Ranch Motel is on the main street
through town, Cushman Street, but we are away from the noise of downtown. As our FAQ page
notes, we are only 1.4 miles from the Railroad Depot (shown on map).
A new page, Far North Attractions
attempts to organize a list of attractions farther north than Fairbanks, as
well as those (like the Midnight Sun
and
Northern Lights) that are particularly associated with
the far north.
Geophysical Institute and Poker Flat Research Station separated and web site links
added. Both are in University section. University pictures removed at their request. Will
be replaced later with our choices, as on the Poker Flat page.
