The Petra Zone

This may be something that was discussed at some point and I just missed it, but does anyone know what happened to this website. It used to be the website that was most on top of everything Petra and now it appears that it hasn't been touched for years.

Josh got married and has a couple of kids and from my experience everything changes priority wise.

new name is petrarocksmyworld,wellaftermykids thatis.com

Josh actually has four kids now--He has a lot to keep up with. He updates as he can, it hasn't been years. There appears to be something going on with it now, upgrading or something.

When Petra retired.. many sites closed up, or didn't have much work done on them. Douglas Sands was one of the first Petra sites on the net, but even that disappeared

Well, it is still there: http://www.citilink.com/~dsands/petra.html , but hasn't been updated for ages. Also MJ sort of disappeared off the radar, even though he occasionally keeps updating guidetopetra.com. Are you still lurking, MJ?

Also, Josh's house was heavily damaged in the tornadoes this summer. I don't imagine PRMW was high priority.

Also Petra retired.

I know Classic Petra is big time (at least among die-hard Petheads), and he may get around to that. The fact that he hasn't responded to this thread probably reflects the time he has available.

Much respect though to PRMW, that was the place to get all the info.

Terrible about Josh's place...Yeah, it was a good site, still is when he's able to work on it. Things do happen where that sort of thing does go on the back burner though.

Well, all this information is exactly why I asked the question. Obviously, some of you know a lot more about why it hasn't been updated for so long than I do. It had just seemed odd to me that a site that was always so on top of everything Petra completely missed Classic Petra and the push for John's new solo album, so I was hoping someone could give me some insight and indeed you did.

I chatted with Josh over Twitter some time ago - said he was interested in CP and would get the album, but he wasn't ever a huge Volz-era fan. He did respond to my post on his forum about the project, however.

I'm sure the low visitor count hasn't provided any compelling reason for him to go out of his way to maintain the site.

Up until 2005 when Petra was tuning down it probably more users and traffic than The Zone.

That's true I used to go to petrarocksmyworld.com every day to read the latest gossip . Josh is a really cool guy too, when I was living in Australia. I used to send Josh money orders and he would help me get Petra stuff that I couldn't get in Australia. I do miss Josh, he does post here now and again.

It feels like the Zone has really picked up the slack. I used to read those sites every day, but now anything that happens that is newsworthy (or not! ha!) is linked to and discussed here. Not as much need for the middleman, as it were.

The loss of those sites is one of the reasons I decided to jump in and flesh out Petra's Wikipedia page; there's a lot of history in there, and it needs to be preserved online for other people to find. Eventually, the inactive sites will go offline for good, and we shouldn't let the history they contain disappear.

I think Josh will update the site when he's able, he's just had a lot to deal with. It is cool that you've worked on the Wikipedia project.