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1998 Site History

  • December 24, 1998 - We reconfigured the dance portion of our site and recovered all the files we had in August and added the related ones from 12 collections. We gave up on our attempt to use Java to provide full text site indexing for our readers and may pull the Java buttons off next.
  • November 27, 1998 - Most of our 60+ software programs now work and most data recovered. We noticed that in our efforts to not lose data, we made a couple of duplicate files - about 20,000. They are being erased as fast as we can identify them. Our hard drive better keep working. In this day of high tech and with all this equipment, we must admit that we finally copied about 100 E-mails from one computer to diskette in text files and then walked them over to the other machine and reloaded them. Hopefully we can catch up by using the holidays and weekends.
  • November 26, 1998 - Finally get the Seagate tape drive to work on the secondary IDE cable with the CD-DVD ROM drive. The directions refused to work for the past four days. I finally reversed the master (tape) slave (ROM) role and they worked. Seagate service personnel kept telling me that the tests showed the I/O failed and the drive needed to be returned to the factory for repair. I don't think I believe them.
  • November 17, 1998 - The Gateway cow boxes arrive. We erase the hard drive and start trying to load about 60 software packages with various patches, hopefully in the correct sequence. Luckily we can move about 7 GB of data, by just switching a hard drive over to the primary IDE slave position. We now must reinstall the Colorado tape drive in the computer with the brain dead mother board. It's easy and it works!
  • November 1-11, 1998 - We determine that part of our problem is that the motherboard is only recognizing memory in banks three and four, but requires some chips in banks one and two to run. Of course Interex tech folks do not agree, forcing us to make a decision. We are going two directions to cover this mess. One: replace the SIMMs in banks one and two with 4 MB EDO memory chips. These are throw aways with no value so they can hold the place, which the board does not recognize. Two: replace the 16 MB chips in banks three and four with 32 MB chips, bringing the usable total to 64 MB. Three: Buy a new Gateway 450 with a single 128 MB DIMM chip and room for two more.
  • October 25, 1998 - Still recovering our software collection and e-mail after wiping both hard drives out about three weeks ago. Outlook is not recognizing the former Outlook files, so we finally give up and realize we lost about 200 E-mails and a couple of thousand address files. We also just received about 30 E-mails sent in 1997. The software with passwords is the hardest to recover, especially since we can't locate some of the passwords. We use AltaVista to search our personal computer as well as the Internet. The latest version of AltaVista Discovery still happily locks up in the middle of our index runs and at its fastest takes four hours to build the index of only a portion of our files.
  • September 10, 1998 - Got two search engines running on site and search engine query block. We are getting more comfortable with Java. Have reworked the site and mirror section to get first block of 5,000 dance steps on site and reindexed for search engines.
  • August 28, 1998 - Tried second Java search engine on our site. It works, except it does not appear to search anything but the txt, htm, and html files. It also likes one word instead of text phrases or Boolean combinations. All right, it choked on the size of our site and the only way we can get it to work is to eliminate more than half our content from its database. Only dances and the primary index will be indexed.
  • August 24, 1998 - Tried first Java search engine on site. Pulled it off as unstable on August 28.
  • August 12, 1998 - Switch to 56K Flex modem and stay with BellSouth service, which is fairly reliable. Make the decision to go to ADSL, when it becomes available this year. It should increase our monthly Internet access costs from $20 to $60 or more.
  • July 3, 1998 - In preparation for a new site mirror section, we noticed a large number of porn links from our normally conservative and child friendly sites. We are clipping part of the URLs out and completely deleting sites to block the porn. We are not permitted to link to any site which provides porn or directly links to a porn supplier. We anticipate this will be our last complete mirror of site sections due to porn and our inability to handle commercialization.
  • June 21, 1998 - We will begin using Adobe Acrobat portable document format instead of HTML for some of our work. It has been accepted by the both the State of North Carolina and federal government as a preferred method of sharing documents across platforms. It is also practical since most ISPs are offering flat rate 56K service for $20 monthly and modems have dropped to the $100 price range.
  • June 14, 1998 - Ready to announce Prio glasses are a good idea, when working on a computer. I've again tried my regular glasses and realized how hard I was trying to manipulate my monitor and focal distances to see the screen. It is so much easier to see the screen with my new computer glasses on.
  • June 13, 1998 - Now running almost 300 E-mail requests behind.
  • June 6, 1998 - Discover a fairly new listing service for the Internet is fronting a major porn site. Tighten policies on links and notify other site owners. Discontinue site links to folks continuing to use the listing service. Redesign mirror site approach.
  • May 11, 1998 - After three years of fighting eyestrain from computer usage, finally take Prio test and commit to Prio glasses.
  • May 10, 1998 - PC Magazine Survey reports Netscape is still at 59% of the browsers being used. We will continue to design for Netscape.
  • May 3, 1998 - Finished the redesign of Tony Wanko's second database. Consolidated over 210,000 data cells and began proofing over 21,000 lines of code.
  • April 30, 1998 - Finish several weeks of work on Tony Wanko's database. He sent us several DOS dBase diskettes of information. We started out by choosing which of his data sets to work with. We used one which started with the dance name. We discovered all text was in CAPS and key fields were cut off at 20 characters wide. We changed the field names, columns in the table, width of columns, moved data, standardized entry and spelling, designed a report, converted the report from Access to HTML, reedited all 2400+ files, and packaged it for presentation in three methods. One of the tricky parts was finding that Access stuck all 2400+ files in one directory with file names that ran about 60 characters long. We did a little more manual labor to split them into three directories and cut the file names down to DOS level. We hope you aren't upset with tildes in our file names. Good night.
  • April 26, 1998 - Flatten the site again trying to work with search engine challenges. Drop the new dances added listing. Drop the choreographers requests for review of the dances. Both due to lack of interest.
  • April 12, 1998 - North Carolina splits area codes. Correct phone numbers on the site for any of the 450 or so exchanges being changed.
  • April 10-12, 1998 - Bell South's RDU connections returning "All circuits busy" signal and if you do connect, there is an extremely reduced speed.
  • January 23, 1998 - Found that BellSouth's new modems for 56 Flex have brought us back up to 28,800 for downloads.
  • January 16-21, 1998 - Unify color and link patterns of core site, making over 22,000 link and line changes.