Category Archives: Website

Rebuilding the site has been slow so far. It’s partly because I’m new to PHP, but mainly from trying to flesh out the new design. Unbeknown to me before I decided to use PHP is that SSI does not work with PHP files. So no more virtual cgi calls (the PHP virtual() function doesn’t seem to work on this server either). So, I’ve had to transcode a few cgi scripts for logging, random quotes, and image viewing. Thus, those functions are working at this time. The image viewer script is going to take a while to implement, though. I’m probably going to make a quick and dirty VB.Net app to do regex replacements for image viewing urls, among other things.

I’m going to seriously be parsing through pages for months trying to get everything setup correctly and checking for broken links. Which reminds me, I also did a 404 error page that uses PHP. Hoping to help people find content as I add it, the error page forces itself into frames as many of the other pages do. And finally, I decided to do away with the old archived news pages (c. 2000-2001) by sticking the content from them into the new Coranto news database. They’ll be rather easy to spot, as we didn’t use subjects back then and I don’t have the time to summon up any. However, I’m pretty sure that I’ve lost any news pics from other old editors; so, if anyone has any of those, send them my way. By the end of the week, I should have the news completed and begun coding the new content system.

As you may have seen on my simple index page recently, six days ago, the RAID array of the server I was on got trashed (post here). There were no backups, and I myself didn’t have complete and current backups for everything that was on this site. So, since I was going to revamp the site over summer vacation anyways, I decided to just start building the site from scratch.

I stuck with a frames design because I like having a stationary navigation that the user can always get to. I think floating DHTML menus look amateur and table designs are trite and inconvenient. I also stuck with frames to minimize content reloading, which is especially useful for flash navigations. But never fear, since I’ve started using PHP extensively in the design, I’ve come up with a way to hopefully make the frames invisible to the user. Using a top secret script, any page on this site that isn’t in the frames will be put back in the frames. It does this even before the page has a chance to load.

Obviously, since I’m starting with a blank slate here, it will take a while for everything to come back online. If you can’t get to something, I haven’t gotten to fixing it yet. Even then, links to specific pages before the crash probably won’t point to the right page. I’ve totally changed the layout of all the content and cut away a lot of the older features. Later on, I hope to put these old features in a sort of viewable statis, though.

Remember, if you need apps like the RoN ScriptMaker, they can be found in the public ftp. I’m still having problems with it, though, so it’s best to download in the evenings.