Mellon Collie

mellon collieWe get melancholy and whistful thinking about the old days. We didn't have this CD in our van on our first club Hatteras trip; we had a previous Smashing Pumpkins release, Siamese Dream.

Since windy days have been very rare lately, we've had to content ourselves with other pursuits. After watching countless cat videos and spending time on internet forums listening to guys piss and moan about their $8000 dollar bikes, we grew bored and chanced upon the log files of this very web site. Ugly, very ugly.

After the big changes earlier this year, there were a few loose ends. It's like doing a big home renovation and then having one of your new cabinet drawers stick a bit. Nothing major but after a while you get tired of it but not enough to call the contractor back and get it sorted out. But then, one day, you do get tired (or maybe the significant other/spouse got really tired) enough to get off your butt and deal with it. We realize that when we start talking about the technicals behind the web site eyes glaze over like doughnuts coming off a Krispy Kreme production line. But, bear with us.

One big problem we came across was that we'd inadvertently imported the old forums twice and the duplicate copy needed to go - some 3500 posts and their replies. There isn't a really good mechanism for doing really big batch changes like this other than to go page by page in the admin interface and select duplicates while being careful not to delete the posts we wanted to keep. So we started at page 154 and wound back all the way to page 1. It sounds like a lot but if any of you have a bit of OCD, you'll understand that once we started, we had no choice whether to continue, it simply had to be done.

But that isn't our point to the story. Scrolling through page after page was almost an emotional experience. Seeing posts by and about old friends, friends who've moved away, who've passed on, who are still part of our lives today. We saw posts when we were very active and when familiy obligations limited our sailing time. We saw the ebb and flow of lake levels, where we sailed and what people were interested in. We were reminded how much fun this all was and is.

The boring part

We did more than trip down memory lane. We were able to clean up a few bugs that had affected the forum, including your ability to edit previous posts. It took a long while to track that one down. Cleaning up the forums also encouraged us to do a bit more pruning and tweaking and, hopefully, the site should load just a touch faster and behave better on your "mobile" device.

Cat wants to hear more about http caching
This cat is fascinated to hear us explain how we've preloaded some images to reduce page load times.
The sage of wsatl dot com

A few years back, we registered the domainwsatl.org to provide a finger friendly shortcut to the web site. The .com version had already been taken but was never, as far as we knew, used for anything. Recently, the .com version's registration expired and we've been inundated by all sorts of companies and agencies telling us that, with their help, we can get the .com version. We keep thinking that half of these outfits are just teenagers in their parents' basement and the other half internet sweatshops in the far east.

We won't be entering the spirited and intense bidding for the .com version. However, you still can use wsatl.org as a shortcut to get here.

Smashing


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FoilDodo's picture
FoilDodo
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Joined: 03/19/2008 - 23:50
Posts: 2738
Re: Mellon Collie

Thanks William.

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Randy's picture
Randy
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Joined: 05/05/2002 - 10:38
Posts: 4656
Re: Mellon Collie

William,

If you read all 154 pages again it must have taken a realllllly long time to do all that. Thanks for all that you do.

What happens in a black hole stays in a black hole.

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webguy
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Joined: 12/31/2000 - 22:01
Posts: 13783
Re: Mellon Collie

Randy, it was hard. Do you have any idea how tired my lips are after having to read 154 pages?

Thank you both for the kind words and your contributions to the forums over the years.

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Stephan
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Joined: 12/07/2011 - 16:04
Posts: 163
Re: Mellon Collie

Thanks Webguy!
I feel like the cat after one page.

Stephan

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Barrett
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Joined: 12/23/2003 - 23:07
Posts: 3395
Re: Mellon Collie

I'll second Stephan's comment - Thanks Webguy!!! As I sit at my desk with another disappointing day of thunderstorms, I'm comforted to know you've spent this time upgrading the website. When the skies clear and wind returns, I'm confident Mellon Collie will drop back into those web history pages.

Barrett

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