Oh, I LOVE technology. Not really. I hate it.
The site was down today because the scripts were causing trouble on the server so the hosting guys renamed them so they wouldn't work anymore. Sounds familiar ? Maybe because they pulled a similar stunt on us last summer (August, conveniently around the time of my birthday) and I panicked. That's when we formed a staff with the full intention of 1) optimizing the current situation to, for now, prevent further downtime and other trouble, and 2) start developing a STABLE content management system setup. We fiddled with PHPNuke for a while but nothing was really developed in the end. Especially since Protagonist never responded to our request for an indication of WHAT caused the trouble. What kind of errors do they get, or at which hour/day did the trouble start (because that could have told me - not anymore now, of course, but back in August it would have - if development versions caused the trouble or if the current 'production' version, which SHOULD be stable, is causing the server overload) and to suggest a compromise solution. Not a single response, ever. So now, on the phone with them, I brought that up again, and got a response I could have expected from a helpdesk run by people-who-are-not-me.
Big dibs to my best friend Tom, who managed to solve this little crisis whereas I can't reach the site's crucial control panel to fix these problems, from work. If there hadn't been a staff, I wouldn't have been able to solve this problem until around 8 tonight. OR I would have had to go to the nearest library again to see if I could fix it from there.
So. I guess it's officially high time we redevelop the damn CMS. Which means entering a realm of unknown technologies to convert a system built complex enough to keep ya busy for a few months straight. I am not looking forward to this. The original system took half a year to develop before August 2003 and it's been developed on ever since.
Anyway.
Been fiddling a bit with Quizilla.com and suddenly, wham, it went down. Around the same time I noticed Probeersel.com was down. So I first thought there was something perhaps with Perl, a bug they never saw coming before that only just now shows its ugly head. But no, the trouble on Probeersel is explained above, and Quizilla is still down.
As I said, I love technology.
I'm not a coder damnit. I wish I was rolling in money so I could convince some really great developers to put time into this. Nobody ever volunteers anymore for good cultural causes like this - at least (with the exception of Tom, and I doubt he would have if I wasn't involved with this site) no developers. Noble hackers my ass. They're all greedy, petty, selfish and self-absorbed geekboys who consider setting something like this up beneath them. At least to my experience so far - if you don't feel this applies to you, I either don't know you at all or you're not a very good developer.
So, I'm not a coder, but someone will have to do the work. Or Probeersel.com dies here and now. So I guess it'll come down to me again - better start buying some books I guess. And who needs sleep anyway ?
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