Transit Center?
November 16, 2008, 3:15 PM
It’s been a frequently asked question for a while about when The Schumin Web Transit Center will reopen. First of all, let me restate: I am fully committed to bringing Transit Center back to the Internet.
However, I continue to state a time frame as “eventually”. The main reason for this relates to plans already in the works at the time that the site went down. In the last year before the outage, updates had become fewer and further between because it had become increasingly troublesome to make updates. This was due to flaws in the site’s original structure design. The old design was very hierarchal, and everything was numbered within those hierarchies. In short: Lots of folders, and the file numbering was specific to the individual folders. I was already devising a plan to address this when the site went down by doing the back-end over again. The images would be pulled from a single large pool, and the database would reflect that. The idea was to create the new structure in the background and then cut over to it when it was all finished.
And then the site went down. I took that opportunity to change Web hosts, moving from a Microsoft server to a Unix-based server. Due to that, the existing site became unusable. Schumin Web and College Life were rebuilt in fairly short order, and Today’s Special followed later.
For Transit Center, rather than rebuild the site based on the existing flawed design, I decided to leave it down pending the completion of the already-planned new site. This big redesign has been slow in coming, partly for a lot of database design planning that turned out to be unworkable, plus regular maintenance and updates elsewhere on schuminweb.com. Now, though, the database is basically laid out, and is being filled up. I’m taking this as an opportunity to do the whole site over from the ground up, and so that’s what’s going on.
And here’s the plan for rollout: When the Washington Metro material that existed prior to the site outage is all finished, I am going to design a front end and release the site. Of course, all the images won’t be there yet, and there will be a lot of holes in the site, but at least there will be a site. Then the rest of the older material will be entered in and released as updates. After all the older material that existed prior to the outage is finished, then I’m starting on new material, and trust me, I have a lot.
So that’s the story. Thank you for your continued patience…
Song: Rohr-Breda version of Sandy Carroll's old "Doors closing!" announcement.
Quote: So there you go...
Categories: Schumin Web meta