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Post by MTD on Dec 31, 2004 20:26:43 GMT -6
As happened at the beginning of April and the end of June (although for different reasons), the official Web site of the Division, www.gulfcoastfencing.org, is down. This time, server at the hosting company has been out of service since about 2 AM Friday, with no estimated return to service.For the interim, go to www.flash.net/~mdelevor/gulfcoastfencing.htm for more technical details, and access to the most popular information from the official Web site.
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Post by schlager7 on Jan 2, 2005 9:04:56 GMT -6
I see the Gulf Coast Division's official site is back up. I know these things happen from time to time, but I think we owe thanks to Matt for having copies of the site he can give us access to when the main server goes down. Pity the USFA can't do as much. I know their internet workforce is made up of volunteers, but... oh, wait, we don't pay Matt anything, either. The division's help is all volunteer, also. I guess it falls to the quality of the volunteer.
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Post by MTD on Jan 3, 2005 15:43:23 GMT -6
Schlager7 is right, the Web site is back. There was only one (known) glitch, where about a day after it returned, out of the blue it stopped serving Web pages, but all other (and much harder for the casual observer) to detect symptoms were perfectly normal. Allegedly, this was a delayed problem caused by the major problem which had already been more or less repaired. All loose ends are believed to have been tidied up. If anything seems amiss, please notify the Division Webmaster at MDelevorya@AOL.com.
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Post by MTD on Jan 3, 2005 16:02:36 GMT -6
... we owe thanks to Matt for having copies of the site he can give us access to when the main server goes down. Thanks for the sentiment, but 1) you didn't get the whole Web site during the breech, and 2) you can't get the whole Web site even if I had tried harder. For sake of enlightenment, these two cryptic statements do actually refer to information which might be of interest to the technically-oriented. 1) Some files were never made available on the temporary Web site, even though they could have been. For example, not every meeting minutes were made available, only recent ones and ones which for some reason had already been made available when the last outage happened. All others could have been made available if somebody had just expressed interest in them. Also, many graphic elements, some purely decorative and some being photographs of the Officers, could have been but were not made available. 2) Some files cannot be made available on the temporary Web site. The temporary Web site is part of what I personally get for Web space from my own ISP. Static, unchanging, HTML is all that can be hosted there. But, much of what is on the Division's Web site is actually dynamically generated from the contents of tables in a database. One table contains all schedule information, and what seem to be 12 different Web pages displaying schedule information are actually 12 different ways of dynamically extracting and formatting data from the table. One family of tables contains all tournament results information, and (with the exception of currently two tournaments) when you display tournament results, the data are taken from tables and formatted. It is because of this that it is possible for the Web site to search for fencers in the tournament data. Most Web hosts can provide the necessary infrastructure for both the databases and the programming to extract the data and format it as Web pages (some, like the current host, provide it as an included part of their service, and others, like the last host, provide it for extra money). But, Flash.Net (a.k.a. Prodigy (a.k.a. SBC Communications)) does NOT provide these fancy Web-hosting facilities for the vanilla Web space which comes with being an ordinary home dialup ISP subscriber! The only reason that any schedule at all was available on the temporary site is that I already had on hand a saved copy of the generated HTML for a combined view of every tournament for every age group. (Don't worry that this dependency on databases is putting any Division data at risk. The actual entire contents of the database tables was backed up, just like all the HTML Web pages. There just wasn't any way to translate that data into Web pages on demand. And, it didn't seem practical to invite the entire Division over to my place to look over my shoulder as I displayed tournament result data for which I used my mechanism to convert the data backup into Micrsoft Access.)
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