So, wait, what happened to…?
2 minute read
January 25, 2009, 12:19 PM
In case you haven’t heard, I recently brought back The Schumin Web Transit Center from what had turned into a year and a half long slumber. Looking around, though, you might be asking me, “But Schumin, where are the Alstom photos? Where are the bus photos? Where are the videos?” Well, they’re coming back, but just not right away.
Realize that the big reason for the delay was because while the site looks visually similar to the old site, it is a completely new Web site under the hood. The database was rebuilt in MySQL from scratch, and all of the pages had to be rewritten in PHP. This all goes back to the July 2007 server failure, which was on a Microsoft server (figures, doesn’t it?). That was the inspiration to complete my planned conversion of the whole site to PHP and MySQL, as I was already in the process of changing hosts when that happened. This just sped the process up. Since the new server isn’t a Microsoft server, the existing site was unusable, and had to be converted over. It took me a month to get the main Schumin Web site going again, a few weeks to bring College Life back online, and then Today’s Special resumed last summer.
With Transit Center, I knew I could just straight-convert my databases like what happened with the other sites. But I didn’t want to. I realized as the Transit Center site grew that updates had become a colossal pain in the butt. So I was planning to scrap the existing database anyway and build a new one. That new one is designed and was made ready for a release, but I’ve not entered everything into it yet.
Which brings me to… where’s the stuff. I decided a while back that when Transit Center returned, it would make its initial debut as Washington Metro only, and no videos. Metro-only is because it’s the biggest part, and even that’s only partially complete at this time. I only built it up enough so that there would be a page for every station, and that there would be a page for Rohrs, Bredas, CAFs, and Breda rehabs. The rest can be added back later. Plus I have a big stash of stuff that’s never been published, and I’ll get that up after the old stuff is all back. Videos, on the other hand, are something I’m still figuring out how I want to implement, so they were left off for now. I’ll come up with how I want to do that later.
But at least finally, the last of the “the system is down” pages are gone.
Song: Theme to Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This? as I was watching the digital camera episode earlier today, where Jory Caron and Jonathan Paula switched places.
Quote: It's good to be back, no?
Categories: Schumin Web meta