Random Recordings of Mental Meanderings

This afternoon will be a fun afternoon. I have to do some software updates on a family website. Several years ago, my father passed away, and in the months leading up to that mournful event, everyone in the family was emailing each other often. It was a bit of a problem, with all the discussions that were going on, since there was no real organization except for the headers, and the number of people involved. Even with that limited amount of organization, people still wandered off-topic quite often.

One day, one of my brothers sent out an email, complaining about the fact that he was only able to check his email once a week or so, and he logged in to find over 400 emails in his inbox, just from family members. He was none too happy.

So I decided to take the initiative, and set up an online community for my family. I purchased server space and bandwidth along with a URL. I experimented with a couple of different pieces of software. Bravenet was used for a while, but it was not very feature-friendly, scalable, or easily modified. I also was limited to their rules and webspace. After looking around at different other software options like phpBB, vBulletin, and Burning Board, I finally decided to use Invision Power Services. It’s a robust system, with lots of options and configurability, better than average support, and lots of resourcs across the net. There are a lot of people and companies that use the software, too.

So, I set it all up, and gave it to my family as a perennial Christmas present. It’s good for me, because I don’t have to do any real holiday shopping, and good for my family, because we can have discussions, make announcements, plan family gatherings, post pictures, chat, etc.

It’s a bit of a pain in the ass to update, however, because you have to

1. Back up the SQL databases
2. Back up all files
3. Upload the new software
4. update all modifications, and
5. test everything to make sure it works

It generally takes about three hours to do most of the bullwork, so that I can open it up to family members again, and then another 5-6 hours to update all the moifications. I’m in the process right now of backing up everything. It’s taken about an hour so far, and the ftp program I use to upload/download files from the net estimates that it will be another 20 minutes or so before I can start uploading files.