Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 23:36:26 -0400
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>
From: "Mike B." <omni at omniphile.com>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: Minutes; other news
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at WSFA.org>

At 04:07 PM 9/18/05 -0400, Gayle Surrette wrote:
>Keith,
>
>Maybe you thought we were ignoring you.  But I guess explaining
>to you at several meeting that you can not take a PHP site and
>simply click on it and put it on your site does NOT create
>a mirror but only a time slice of the site at the moment you
>did it -- didn't count as explaining anything.  Telling you
>that we had to completely recode the site to get pages to
>work on your mirror also didn't equate to talking and explaining
>things to you.

I don't want to, and don't plan to, get into the discussion of the past or
present of the personal issues here, but I am curious about the technical
aspects of why the site would have to be recoded to work on the mirror
site.  I understand already why you can't snapshot a PHP site in a browser,
but need access to the actual files (and perhaps databases) used to run it,
but I'm not familiar enough with PHP in general, and the Capclave site in
particular, to understand why it would take much work to pick it up en mass
and move it to another domain.

What little I know of PHP so far seems to indicate that if another site has
PHP support in the server, and whatever databases (if any) the site uses
(with the appropriate data in them of course), then things should run fine
on the new site.  Any site-specific items, like URLs, can be generated on
the fly with constants in a configuration file that should be quick to edit
for the new domain.  That sort of thing is common in writing portable code
in C, and should carry over to PHP, right?  It seems I'm missing something
here, and I'm curious what it might be so I can investigate further.

If it's not a one sentence answer, like "Kieth's site doesn't support PHP"
(or some other required environment capability), I'm perfectly happy to
chat about it at a meeting if either of you are willing do educate me a bit
on this subject.  I've looked at PHP programming a little, and since I
already know C very well, it doesn't look too difficult to learn and I'm
always up for that. ;-)

>We didn't want to run the Capclave site at all.
>As we have told you a dozen times, we only offered to design
>it.

What's involved in running the site?  Is it just FTPing files as needed?
Setting configuration items like e-mail forwarding for official mailboxes
to whoever is handling the function at the moment?  Dealing with the ISP?
Checking to see if it's still up every day?  Backing things up
occasionally?  That sort of thing?  If so, perhaps someone else could take
that over from you if you want to stick just with design and not site
management.  Depending on what's involved, I might be able to do it if
nobody else wants to really, really badly.  I'm very familiar with
computers, and the internet, and I'm getting more familiar with web sites
all the time (as time permits).

Just being curious, and maybe helpful, so feel free to ignore me if you are
busy.

-- Mike B.
--
****************************************************************************
*       Mike Bartman       *   Puzzles Pondered    Obfuscation Obliterated *
* Omniphiles International *  Confusion Canceled      Opinions Offered     *
*    omni at omniphile.com    *   Options Outlined       Smiles Stimulated    *
*--------------------------------------------------------------------------*
*            "We do it all!  No job too small!  No price too high!         *
****************************************************************************