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| Finally An Update |
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| by Scott Legal |
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What's new? For the first time in 4 years this section has been updated. I've also added a couple of new articles. I guess the obvious question that needs to be answer is what took so long? That's a complicated question really
The last time I did major updates was in 2005. A couple of things happened in 2005 that changed the way I dealt with the website. The first thing that happened was that I changed jobs. In hindsight, that turned out to a bad move. The 3 years I spent at that job turned out to be the longest 10 years of my life. In a nutshell, the hours were killing me. That undoubtedly took time away from the time I used to devote to this site, but I don't think that was the only thing behind the lack of updates.
At about the same time the website can under fire by spam bots. At first I handled the spam bots by deleting the spam right away. That meant that I needed to watch the message board more often than usually. Eventually the bots were logging messages at a rate of 10 or so spam messages for every one non-spam message. Clearly, I was losing the battle. So I spent a lot of time working on a solution. I weighed making this a membership website. In the end I opted for an approval queue. Unfortunately, all that accomplished was keeping the spam off of the message board, not for coming in. In the end I needed to put a captcha on the message board. That stopped the bots in their tracks. With the approval queue I need to spend more time managing the website and even had to enlist the help of a couple of admins. Thanks again Marsha and Renae.
After things started humming along a little better message board activity started dropping. I guess I lost any motivation I may have had to contribute new content to the website, when it seemed like the website wasn't as active as it once was.
Then an event occurred in late 2008 that seemed like the end of the whole website. My hosting company changed my database protocol. In order to get the website back up and running I needed to re-code the whole website. At that point I gave up on that hosting company and went out and looked for another hosting service. I learned that month-to-month hosting had become a thing of the past and hosting companies that had the database support that I needed for this site wanted 2-3 years up-front. Then there was the issue with moving everything over. Finally, I needed to convince my wife to let me plunk down $360 plus the moving service to get the site back up and running. She said "No".
Fast forward to June, 2009 and I received a phone call from my friend John (Trurokr). He told me he would see if he could raise the money through an event to bring the website back, but he needed to make sure that I would do it. I agreed. The turn out at the event in July, 2009 was huge. I truly felt like this website was missed. I got the site back up and running as soon as possible. (Thanks for getting this done, John)
So here we are 13 days before Christmas Day. I've just posted new articles on Pyramid Peak and Lake Tahoe. I've added a few videos, both new and old. I have a few other articles in mind including possibly writing a couple on long past adventures like Matilija.
At this point I want to reiterate that I will gladly post articles by others. In fact, I would very much like to see other people's contributions. For instance, Robb Dogg did a great climb up Red Slate Mountain. That's exactly the kind of content and participation that I think this site needs. (I'm not trying to pick on you Robb, just to give everyone an idea. So please let me know if you'd like to contribute content.
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