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AGORA, the Aromatherapy Global Online Research Archives, was founded in the late 1990's by a group of aromatherapists led by Michel Vanhove, who now lives in France. The concept was to share linked together pages, hosted at various donated Internet websites, about Aromatherapy and related topics. Although at the time we probably thought that it might help drive traffic to our various websites, our main concern was to help spread information and to set up a distributed, non-centralized system. I (Rob Stitt) volunteered to be the technical manager for the sites, and for a number of years ran a mailing list for the volunteers to help coordinate setting up the sites and in theory keep AGORA maintained.
However, since 1998, the Internet has changed a lot. Although we attempted to enforce a standard look on the various sites, not everyone followed the internet coding standards that were emerging at the time. By today's standards, this site looked archaic. It wa still full screen, although most monitors are now wide screen. Some pages were left justified, some were centered. Some used tables to control the layout, some didn't use anything, and a few used primitive css.
In about 2005, we lost access to the index page, so that it couldn't be edited, even though it was still there until early in 2012. I managed to copy the files that were there before its inevitable demise.
In 2013 I moved the Index and the files that were hosted with it to this site. Since all of the pages link back to the Agora Home Page, which then links to the Index, you probably got here from there.
There are a number of broken links, either because of some dead websites or because of structural changes in the Web. I am importing pages from the Wayback Machine to get those resolved and either move the article to a new host site, or get it reconstituted. I plan to mark the bad links but leave them on the page as a reminder of AGORA's history. I will check the intenet Archives to see if I can find things. However, some of the articles may have been lost or are completely inaccessible. In a few cases some pictures were not saved by the Archiving software, so they are probably lost.
Almost all email addresses are obsolete. To contact an author, you can still click on the Index links, but be warned that they may not work. I am endeavoring to get them corrected, but will leave them up for now until I determine the new addresses; you might get through.
Please be aware that Aromatherapy has also changed since the turn of the century. Many aromatherapists who were active in 1998 have moved on to other activities. Websites have changed, been shutdown, or merged with others. The mailing lists that were the main source of aromatherapy communications in the 90's have been replaced by blogs, Facebook Groups, or Twitter. AGORA is still here, we have a Twitter feed and perhaps we'll start Facebook page to link people to it.
Since 2013 the site has been upgraded to be fully responsive, suitable for use on Tablets and Phones. All pages that have been found have been updated to a standard format. In many cases it was necessary to move the pages that had been hosted elsewhere to the AgoraIndex.org site. For more information on the status, see the notes in the right sidebar.
Welcome to the reconstituted AGORA Index site. Click here to go directly to the Agora Index, or use the menubar at the top of the page. Otherwise you can read below for some status notes. Or see the @AgoraAroma twitter feed.
The AGORA site has recently gone through an upgrade to a responsive site that can be easily read on all sizes of browsers, from a widescreen monitor to a tablet or a smart phone.
As of September 2014 this process is substantially complete. The few pages remaining that are not converted on their original host site have been converted on the AgroaIndex.org server and can be selected by clicking on a link.
While this transition is in progress, you may find yourself on 1998 vintage page that will not look quite the same as the rest of the site. You may have to use your back button to return to where you can continue to browse to another topic that interests you. Be patient, things will be changing soon.
The conversion process is substantially complete. See notes above for status as of September 2014.
All vintage pages are now converted to responsive format as of June 2015.
-Michel Vanhove
AGORA Pages originally hosted on these now dead sites are now hosted on the AGORAIndex.org site when available:
- benzalco.com
- aromavitae
- aromatours
- FragrantDemon
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©Aromatherapy Global Online Research Archive and it's individual authors. All Rights Reserved.