Another Week Down...

The preparations for such a move have been in the works for about a month, actually. But only has it been in the last week when things have gotten serious. The weeks prior to this last were used in upgrading and bugfixing the website. Namely, the site changed from HTML to PHP. This was for one of two reasons:

1. As it previously had been, the site was using the same (quite large) chunk of HTML on each page to produce the top and side navigation bars. Not only did this make upgrades impossible (change one page, must change them all), but it also added about (believe it or not) 150KB to the site's disk usage. By using includes in PHP, I was able to use a series of stock pages, including them for each page request. While this doesn't make the user's load any faster, it does save a significant amount of disk space (and just makes my life as the maintainer a whole lot easier).
2. The future. I have a feeling that at some point in time there will be a semi-serious need for data-driven pages. This is already evident in the administrative back-end of the site (the 'private' part). As we develop and market products through the website, it's ultimately likely we'll need more dynamic content which can be generated in a PHP sort of fashion.

Anyway, earlier this week (Tuesday, I believe) the new host account was set up; Thursday morning I uploaded all the new files to the new host and got some (of that which I could) things configured...namely ensuring the bulk of the pages were working and that the MySQL tables had been imported/converted as expected.

Thursday was also the big day...because it was the day we officially switched providers...signified by the change in DNS. So, for most of the day Thursday (from about 9am Central through approximately 2am Central) and into early Friday there was no connection to a valid host (while the DNS changed).

But, as of this morning (Friday), things are working well. Now that the domain change took place, I've added some POP user accounts for mail and also ensured that the extra features of the PHP/MySQL thing were working as expected. All is going well now...so we shall see what happens in the future.

Aside from that...

Tomorrow (Saturday) is the first weekend I'll have off from Subway and also be at home all day. It looks like Sunday will also be of that type. So, hopefully some other miscellaneous projects will get done in that time.

Until next time...

-- MattZaske - 26 Mar 2004

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