Many of you have probably wondered what happened with the recent site outage, and the current state of the site. Well, here’s the deal.
The site went down on Wednesday, July 18. The windows server that it lived on went down, and unlike most downtimes, it stayed down, and there was no word from my hosting people on what was wrong.
Now as it was, I’d had a long-term plan to switch the site over from a Windows-based system to a Linux-based system by way of a host change. The forums’ changeover to phpBB at the end of March was the first step in that process. So once the Windows server went down and stayed down, I just simply changed my plans a bit. Rather than make the cutover somewhat seamlessly, or in stages, I did the full cutover and now I’m redoing the site to run under this new system.
In the end, the site should look very similar to how it looked prior to the outage. The only differences will be in minor details. However, a look “under the hood”, so to speak, reveals a totally different system underneath. While before we used an MS Access database and ASP under the hood, now we’re using mySQL and PHP.
And in switching systems, one thing I did look at was various content-management systems. I tested WordPress. I tried Plone. I experimented with Joomla. I even looked at MediaWiki. All of them seemed okay, but all threatened to rob my site of its personality, and make it look, in my opinion, a little cookie-cutterish. Ultimately, I chose to rebuild the Web site exactly as it was before, with the new engine under the hood, so to speak. I like the design. That’s partly why it’s undergone so little modification in the last few years.
So slowly but surely, the site will be coming back. You can’t keep Schumin Web down for long. However, you will need to update your bookmarks and links, as almost every “inside” URL will be changing.