Thursday, September 29, 2005

Disaster Nearly Averted: Downtime

This was not supposed to be the title of this post.
This was supposed to be a happy post about the new Toy Island line. GoLive, however had other plans. The site had been becoming increasingly difficult to update. Pictures wouldn't link, links would fail, it would not do what you set it to do. Wierd, unexplainable stuff like arbitrarily having some pictures show and others not, despite the exact same procedure being followed each time.

Looked over some books and wondered if having the site so far buried in subdirectories of the hard drive (there are many) was part of the problem. Moving it only made things worse. It spawned several copies of strange items I'd generally left alone. "*.data" and others. This also served to utterly ruin the original index. Spent a couple hours fixing it...but It also created a second, blank index that was boldly titled and did nothing.

However, the image placing error was fixed/navigated around through different methods and the http://sonicgear.merlinwebs.com/USAPages/SonicAccessories.html pages of both USA and Japan http://sonicgear.merlinwebs.com/JapanPages/JapanAccessories.html were a success in short order. All the fixing of the index had been for nothing though, as the new one was still worthless. The entire site's navigation ability relies on the massive tree o' links on the index so most of SonicGear was inaccessable for something like 15 hours or so.

A long night indeed was spent half-way fixing it (till 4am, have to work at 930 am someplace else until about 730 at night) and the rest was repaired tonight, because it needed to be. The site must continue to bring fans the news that companies won't!

Everything on Sonic Gear is in working order once again, and more content is soon to come, especially now that it is quick and easy to place on the site. There's a big archive merger along the way (new and old) so once all the pages are in place, new content will come flooding into the already created pages, with frequent fun updates.

This was truly a trial to the dedication of this site, and it was never questioned even once along the way. This place is totally worth it.

Sonic Rules!