If you’ve tried to access Keim-web.com over the past few weeks, you probably already know that we’ve been having some trouble.
I was doing a routine software upgrade—routine except that I haven’t needed to do an upgrade in over a year and a half. During the upgrade I managed to reformat the hard drive that contained the web site’s database. Thus, I lost everything—all the content. That means I lost the news stories, the comments, all the information contained on some of the information pages, the forum posts, and the guestbook. The most annoying thing was that I realized what I had done just seconds after I did it. It was too late. All I could do was watch as the site was wiped clean.
So, over the past few weeks, I have been able to reconstruct the stories using Google Search Engine"> Google /a> and its cached pages. The guestbook is completely gone and I lost a number of user records. You may have to re-register in order to get access to the galleries and Mason News.
I have quite a few pictures to post. Hopefully I will have a chance to post a few over the next couple days.
Have been tweaking the website to improve performance. I found that I could tell the webserver to compress the pages before sending them. That by itself was a good bump in speed.
However, I also noticed the page was completely reloading each request instead of relying on the browser’s cached version of the page (the version that is temporarily stored on your hard drive). It wasn’t even using these files. I’m sure it was doing that to make sure people always see the freshest information. But since I don’t update the page every thirty seconds, it seems a little silly to do a complete reload. So each page will now only reload every 12 minutes.
The pictures and other graphics will only reload every 9 months. How’s that for persistence? What this means is that the website will seem faster and will seem to get even faster each time you visit. We’ll see if that actually holds true.
As always, let me know if you have any problems.
I’ve been making some changes to make the site easier to navigate. Wanted to give it a cleaner look.
Older stories can now be found in the archives. If you want to log in just click on “settings.” Once you are logged in, click on settings again to change your preferences. If you don’t like the new look, you can change the theme (which just changes the look of the site). “Test2” is the new default theme. Try it out and see how you like it.
Let me know if you have any problems or questions.
If you tried to log onto the web site between Saturday and today you were likely greeted with a message explaining that the server was down for routine maintenance. Routine may not be quite accurate.
After using the computer that runs the server (located in our basement) to check movie times (our home workstation computer is still down) I noticed one of the temporary directories was running out of space. Had I simply shut the machine down and re-booted everything would probably have been fine.
Instead, I decided to start deleting things that looked expendable. In a matter of minutes I rendered much of the computer unstable – the web server was still operating but it was poking along.
The short of it is that I spent much of Sunday backing up the web site and Monday and Tuesday reloading the system software and restoring the web site. I think most everything is now functioning – except the Calendar but it wasn’t getting much use yet anyway. If you run into any problems, please let me know!