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1997 Site History

  • November 29, 1997 - After investing a great deal of time experimenting with FrontPage, declare it definitely not appropriate to work with on this site. Our situation is similar to the "Charlie Tuna" television commercial. We want great tasting tuna, rather than great looking tuna. We have to be able to get the content out.
  • November 23, 1997 - Caught up on E-mails, but behind on dance typing and posting. Experimenting begins with Microsoft FrontPage. It can make a site look wonderful and do some things very well and easily. There are some challenges:
    • Loaded the program from the CD-ROM and discovered that although it advertised the latest version of Internet Explorer (remember that IE 4 has been around for about 90 days-Microsoft did the readme files with a September date) it merely reloaded my IE 3.02 back on. That was after telling me to uninstall the working and configured original registered copy. Please note that Internet Explorer 3.02 is not capable of viewing all the enhancements this program makes in your site, if I am to believe the instructions.
    • Downloaded Internet Explorer to get the full view of the site and after a couple of hours downloading, found out via Microsoft's warning file it would interfere with some of the leading utilites on the market today - Norton's Utilities, Norton Navigator, MICROSOFT MONEY ON-LINE BANKING, all but the very latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader, CleanSweep, MICROSOFT INTERNET INFORMATION SERVER 4.0, ProComm Plus 95 Web Browser, Stacker, Telcom FAX, DEC Clientworks, PICS Support, MICROSOFT NETMEETING, Access Aptiva, etc. Remember that it also requires 12-16 MB memory, plus virtual memory, and 40-70 MB hard drive space.
    • Discovered that it disabled my AltaVista Personal Search running on my hard drives when it loads its server.
    • Wasted time on reinstallation of FindFast/FastFind the problematic Microsoft hard drive serve tool, when it decided it wasn't going to find anything fast anyway.
    • Lengthy code eats hard drive space and increases upload time. A basic page printed out as 2 pages from our HoTMetaL efforts, but that same file became 12 printed pages longer after importing to FrontPage due to additional code for the uniform site look and new style links.
    • FrontPage 97 fights, erases, and ignores a home page, if you end it in html. This is frustrating since we started with htm and migrated by request to html. FrontPage will take html endings anywhere else in the site. Hate to make everyone change links to get to the site again.
    • Eats drive space and upload time by doubling the number of files on the site due to a required standards page for each file.
    • Wastes a lot of time while doing corrections or adding pages. It takes about 3-15 minutes to do each individual file save. This may be the acceptable norm for additions in a site manager, but it is not appropriate when making hundreds of small text changes in pages. Don't ask about my machine-I'm running a 166 Mhz with 64 MB in memory.
    • The Save All feature does not work. This is supposed to allow you to open many pages, make the corrections, and then save all open pages at one time. Only after closing 1-200 pages and catching a look at one did we realize only the top page was being saved - the same as using the Save or Save As control.
    • There appear to be Java Script problems or conflicts. Some page headings in Internet Explorer 3.02 were displayed in multiples as the rest of the page either disappeared or replicated. Netscape 4.0+ displayed many totally blank pages. This appears to be due to pages that we're importing, many in PRE code (plain text inside an html body tag), which are having a conflict with the floating margin and links on the left side of the page. By boxing the pages' text into a table, (set width to 100%) we are able to stabilize the situation, but it requires opening each page individually to perform this task.
    • The Table of Contents feature sounds great, but it requires dragging all the files into the graphic site organization display, which gets to be a pain at 4,000 plus files. It also requires a screent the size of a football field. The links on that screen change the way they display in the column. NO. It will not just index and display your site pages because you have them linked so nicely.
    • The above graphics layout of the site is also required in order to get the appropriate automatic page links to display on the top and left sides of each page. Just being properly linked will not do it.
    • Once a page has been modified by FrontPage, many site tools such as HoTMetaL Pro can not open the files. You will have to take them to Notepad, or due to the bloat Wordpad.
    • Even with the server extensions, installed, the site search capabilites do not always work. In fact, the search page provided by Microsoft will not even save in some circumstances. The server times out before the save is made. You may get around this by bringing it to screen and then copying it through the clip board to be saved into an html file outside the server area of the drive. Then import it into the site. It still may not have a built index or be able to read it correctly.
  • November 18, 1997 - Triple digit E-mails received today - the first E-mail for weeks! The good news is - We are caught up to October 15. Of course 1997.
  • November 17, 1997 - Cyrix replacement chip arrives and the motherboard recognizes it. The case is back on the computer again! But, still loading and proofing software and data files. It is a good time to update older versions of the software.
  • November 12, 1997 - Most software reinstalled on drives. Relocated and relinked about 3,000 site files. Tried to flatten out the Internet site to accomodate the MetaLab Infoseek search engine. We were moving hundreds of E-mail addresses from Netscape to Outlook when the computer went down last month. It will take a little while to straighten out our E-mail. We are behind in our work. I now have four full mail totes sitting on the floor waiting for attention, a little over 3,000 new songs to play (including Dobie Gray's 1973 release of There's a Honky Tonk Angel (Who'll Take Me Back In)) and index, and I suppose hundreds of E-mails waiting for this computer and human to get fully functional.
  • November 11, 1997 - Discover that Cyrix has a batch of chips that aren't running to specifications. Try to arrange exchange.
  • November 8, 1997 - Replacement motherboard works, but fails to recognize new Cyrix PR166+ chip. Set manually instead.
  • November 7, 1997 - Federal Express brings us new Western Digital hard drive and it works!
  • November 5, 1997 - Our Western Digital hard drive fails. Best Buy store management makes decision that they will not honor the printed warranty for an exchange so we ship it back to manufacturer. We arrange for cross ship and pay for FedEx overnight delivery.
  • November 4, 1997 - Our replacement AT style generic motherboard has defective clock chip and must be replaced.
  • October 25, 1997 - The motherboard can't handle a new IDE controller card. Gave up on motherboard.
  • October 20, 1997 - Lost Packard Bell IDE controller section of motherboard.
  • October 10, 1997 - The Seagate replacement drive arrived. It was a factory repair and was still defective. We are sending it back again.
  • October 4, 1997 - We pulled the national schedule of workshops and competitions off due to low interest and heavy ballroom formats. Our mail this summer was primarily ballroom promotions.
  • October 2, 1997 - The guru says, "MetaLab is now running on an Ultra Enterprise Server with 4 133Mhz CPUs, 1 Gig of RAM, and an external hard disk."
  • September 28, 1997 - Dropped Electric Possum site, believing it is near dead. Dropped Johnston County Schools, related educational information, and county promotional information since we are currently working in Wake County. Dropped John D. Johnson's draft of his book on Alternative Education, which was related to Johnston County. Dropped site censorship tools due to lack of interest from readers. Dropped Reba fan site since she has her site up and running.
  • September 23, 1997 - Spent 90 minutes listening to Best Buy store staff tell me they weren't going to honor a written drive warranty, which states it could be returned to place of purchase. Of course the sale model in the newspaper ad was out of stock. Went to their competition to buy a new hard drive.
  • September 22, 1997 - Began linking dance site mirrors without graphics and sound. We are hoping to reduce the time spent on E-mail questions and answers. Lost another Seagate hard drive today, with .5G unrecoverable. There went a lot of dance text and almost all our graphics.
  • September 18, 1997 - Determined that the Site search tool index was accurate to August 27th or so. Perhaps it will be updated monthly or semiannually. This is up to the UNC LAN Administrator. Added a second link to it from the Library page.
  • August 24, 1997 - Dropped our mirror of Slickerbilly's AOL site. The AOL site has been working solid and we can achieve the same coverage by linking. We also realized that we did not have a proper software and hardware relationship to match real time changes.
  • August 16, 1997 - Matched and expanded Jon Leech's internet information on Ballroom, Swing, Shag, Lindy Hop, Salsa, and Latin dance for the Triangle Region. He moved to California and we were concerned that his dance customers might lose their source of information. It is an additional community service.
  • August 11, 1997 - Sandra accepts job offer and we begin to broaden and redefine the site to include Garner High School.
  • July 3, 1997 - We beat our goal (September 1, 1997) of renaming, sorting, and relinking all files. During the past week, we made over 15,000 small changes on the site, primarily changing 880 files (8,627,714 bytes). Everything but the Home Page is in new subdirectories and all files were changed to the .html ending. For country western non-techie folks, you can find the main index at: http://www.ibiblio.org/schools/rls/dances/01/dialpha.html
    WebMasters and techies, your files are called:
    The dances written for our classes and therefore are in uniform terminology are in files: 8001.html - 8134.html
    The dances that we've been able to get on the internet (in various writing styles) are in files: 7000.html - 7392.html
  • June 25, 1997 - UNC started running Infoseek's Server, Ver. 1.1b7, giving us site search capability. We have no idea of how often it is updated. Link added from our Home Page.
  • June 19, 1997 - Discovered added value of using .html for pages, particularly our index page. Plan to change over. Since the number of files going on the site are well over 2,000, we are moving toward more directories.
  • June 13-15, 1997 - Tried to move our address books and mailing lists from Pegasus to Netscape Communicator. Could not find a method to export the entire records from Pegasus or even then get them into Netscape. Finally trashed all mailing lists. Took each address book and pasted it into its own mailing list and sent them to BellSouth with changes in the ID block. All but one arrived back in our Netscape folder for fairly easy assimilation, but not quick, into our new address book. Expecting to write a lot of apologies since one of our largest escaped into the Internet in replicated form.
  • June 10, 1997 - Began switching to Netscape Communicator 4 for our basic browser and E-mail package.
  • June 2, 1997 - Pulled our sound files off the site's leading pages, because the virus warnings that precede transmission of the sound files were scaring some people away from the site. We left one that was created by Slickerbilly and related to their experimental band section on our site.
  • June 1, 1997 - Replaced all 783 files on site. Hope we used correct file versions, with working links.
  • May 23, 1997 - Was notified that our site had broken links due to missing files. We knew MetaLab had a hacker invade, but only now began seeing the damage. Several dozen files (at least) were missing or corrupted.
  • May 7, 1997 - Removed first link to a site that was filling with explicit sexual and racial trash talk. NOTE: It was the fans writing in the guest book section, not the site sponsors, who were being trashy.
  • March 23, 1997 - Posted first Shockwave animation on the site, but on a noncritical links page.
  • March 22, 1997 - Discovered Microsoft Internet Explorer Ver. 3.0 does not always work as well as Netscape on client side image maps. Reworked the A-Z map and inserted it into the 26 dance index files.
  • March 11, 1997 - Posted new dances on the site and went over the 500 mark. That's a lot of dancin'.
  • February 12, 1997 - Posted jg2's travel commitments for the year as the basis for the 1997 workshop and contest section.
  • February 4, 1997 - As a community service and to permit experimentation with reverse colors (sure it's very common, but we're conservative) we added a fan site, promoting a local country western band. Photos were requested, but not supplied. Scanning the CD cover failed to produce any images worthwhile. Running 25 days behind in E-mail and file transfers.