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Version history

Previous versions of the website:

Jan 11, 2002:
3.0.1 beta

June 1999
Last site on AOL

January 1998
First site on AOL

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So...what happened to my website you ask...

Date: 13/June/2002
Subject: How to (not) safely compute
by Ray Stankewitz

Well, anyway, it goes like this-back a few years ago, we were faced with a dilema, either revamp this site or shut it down. I didn't like the thought that all of this hard work would go down the drain, so I began a task of giving this site a new look. We got the site up, only to find out that the host (who shall remain nameless) was deleting our pages for some reason. I kept putting the pages back and disaster struck!

It was during an ftp session over a dial-up. I still to this day don't really know what happened, but the computer rebooted, earning it's name (The Crash Kid©) and corrupting the files that I had on a Zip100 disk. Did I mention that this was the only copy that I had of my entire website? Yup, the only copy, gone. Did I also mention that the server had lost all of the pages, leaving the image files as the only reminder of the former Grandpa Ray's Website.

I resorted to the only method possible, a utility created by a friend to recover anything from that disk. After many(!) hours, I was able to recover some of the site, and re-constructed the rest from memory and some of an old Version 1.0 website. I still think that there are things that are missing from it, but by far, the site lives again.

Lessons Learned (the hard way)...

Never, Never keep just one copy of something that may be not easy to retrieve. Keep at least 2 copies (and not on the same disk, Virginia) of anything you are working on. Please, please listen to the voice of experience. I have learned a hard lesson about data storage, one that cost about a years worth of hard work to recover. Be sure to save often, and keep the second copy up to date every time you finish doing what you are doing. This will save you a lot of grief later on.

I do not fault the Iomega™ Zip100 drive, nor The Crash Kid© for the problem. I should have been practicing safe computing and been more careful. I now do a weekly backup of changed files on a CD-RW. Please do the same and you will not have the same problems that I had.

So...anway, this is the versions history in a nutshell:

  • January 1998 we went online with our first website. It looked bad but it worked.
  • June 1999 We had our last site up on AOL that looked better but we kept having problems with downtimes.
  • January 11, 2002 The day of the disaster! Not good for us! The site was not functional again until June of that year!
  • Since then? Just incremental changes mostly until now when we went to this sleek look. We still hope to find a regular host for cheap and be done with the Geocites pop-beside banner that I despise!

If you have any questions about this article, feel free to E-mail Me.