Published by KermMartian on September 26, 2007 at 9:02:57 AM CST

Lately, many of you have wondered about the present and future state of Cemetech. Let's start with the past, and why many of you cannot find your old posts, topics, and sometimes even accounts. If you check out the Cemetech history page, you'll see that we were hosted for the past two years by Jatol, which had been around for a while and seemed like a relatively reliable host. On September 1, 2007, some of Jatol's clients started to experience intermittent outages and downtime; unfortunately, Cemetech was among the last affected, so I didn't hear about the problems soon enough to generate an up-to-date backup. When Cemetech finally went down completely, I searched the internet, only to find a Slashdot article about Jatol disappearing entirely, stranding thousands of customers. I waited a week, then brought Cemetech back on SurpassHosting. The bad part is that I had gotten complacent with Jatol's reliability and hadn't performed a full backup including databases since June 27th, 2007. I had a full file backup of the current iteration of Cemetech, but as the databases are stored separately, about four thousand posts, twenty members, and around two hundred thousand words were lost.

Now, onto the future. The keen-eyed among you have doubtless noticed beta.cemetech.net progressing gradually over the past few months as I find time to work on it between my schoolwork and other projects. The idea is a semi-complete rewrite of the site; technically it's Cemetech 6.2, built to make all site pages run off the phpBB templating system for more flexibility than the current Cemetech4 (CemetechLite) / Cemetech5 site. I've also been building a few extra scripts and features, as well as formatting pages to work on a wider variety of resolutions. It looks passable on 800x600 and is also readable and functional on my new 3,342x1,024 triple-head workstation. I will be completing the remainder of beta.cemetech.net over the next month or two, then bringing it live; I will disable support for Cemetech4 and Cemetech5 when I do so to avoid having to parallel support two different site schemes. Feel free to post in the associated topic with bug reports concerning the resurrected site (for example, databases or projects that still don't work), comments on beta, or general comments on the past and future of Cemetech.

Permalink