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11/05/2007: "Changes A'Comin' to SCMO ..."

Long-time visitors to this site know that it's a one-man show - the only thing standing between SCMO and internet oblivion are me, a Macintosh and a couple of cans of Red Bull. That said, it's always been important to me that the site be as professional as possible, and like the Great and Powerful Oz I spend a lot of time making sure you can never see the little man behind the curtain.

Three times in our storied history, the site has gone through significant upgrades. The first time was back in '96, when I decided what was at that point a school project was going live beyond my educational needs. The second was in 1997 when we went big time and became marlinnut.com, and the last was in 2002, when we rolled out the site you see today. Periodic upgrades and new features have been added over the years - like this blog - but the code driving the site is now 5 years old.

It might not seem like it, but 5 years is a couple of generations in Internet years. Much of the technology that was cool and cutting edge in '02 is old and creaky in '07. Every winter, I contemplate the need to upgrade and evaluate the benefit. For the last couple of years, I've been able to talk myself out of it. But not this time.

Part of my job as diligent webmaster is to maintain a disaster recovery system - copies of critical files that can be used to recreate the site should the doody smack the blades. MarlinBlog readers will recall an incident last year that drove home the need for just such a plan. If your site is made up of mostly static or unchanging pages, it's no big deal - you have the copies on your local hard drive anyway. But if you have a dynamic site like SCMO, where there are new MarlinClub postings constantly being added and other interactive features being utilized, you need to regularly back up those new files from the server, creating a local copy.

I did just that last week, when I decided to back up the files that make the Offshore Fishing Forum tick. It'd been a couple of months since I'd done it - a serious breach of webmaster protocol - so I expected that there'd be a few new files on the server. A few - right. Try over 15,000 thousand. It took a full three days to create a full backup - and that was all the incentive I needed to look to upgrade.

Most of our interactive features here at SCMO - the OFF, the MB, OGRRS, etc - use programs written in PERL. It's an easy language to learn, and lets me modify existing programs to work seamlessly with others here at SCMO and to maintain a consistent look and feel to the site. The down side, though, is that most PERL scripts save their data in the form of text files on the server. For example, when you post a message over at the Marlin Club, that message is saved as a file. There's another file that saves the information about who posted it ... another about the forum it's posted in ... another with configuration settings ... and on and on. For a medium-sized forum like ours, the technology isn't overwhelmed, but its close. As you increase the traffic and number of users, you risk data collision - something a system like ours doesn't handle well at all. That's why higher traffic sites like Allcoast and Bloody Decks have moved away from this method to ones that use a database back end to manage their forums. Databases handle multiple users seamlessly with no risk of data collision - and no loss of data. What's more, all you have to do is back up the database regularly - no more thousands of files.

What's that all mean, you ask? Easy - we're getting out of the stone age. In upcoming weeks, you'll see new versions of both the Offshore Fishing Forum and the MarlinBlog that will take advantage of database-based systems.

Now, I know many of our users fear change, and I'm sympathetic to that. For our forums, I've opted to go with the latest version of the same software that currently runs our forums - DCForum. It's database-driven, but continues to function in a way that will be familiar to our current visitors. There's a downside to that decision, in that the software is no longer being developed, so there won't be any upgrades to it in the future. But I'm pretty sure this is our last round of upgrades anyway ...

The other item to change will likely be at the MarlinBlog itself. I'll admit I absolutely love the Greymatter software that runs the MB. It's very easy to customize, I love the layout, and it has a great grass-roots group of folks supporting it for the future. But like the old version of DCForum, it uses text files to store information, and that means the whole backup issue once again. So I'm looking at WordPress, a database-driven blogging package, as a possible replacement. One thing that makes WP appealing is that it has a utility that will convert all the existing MB posts made with Greymatter over to the WP format - no loss of data. But formatting is a bitch, and integrating it into the site will be a major challenge.

None of the changes will happen overnight, and everyone will get fair warning. Just wanted to pass along the latest and get everyone looking forward to the future. More as it becomes available ...