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Rutabaga

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Everything posted by Rutabaga

  1. I switched to a Ruth Rendell book, "From Doon with Death." Better. Kind of dark. R
  2. I'm always amazed at the stories that Alan Dwight is able to think up. This one is right up there with the best of them. R
  3. An incredible story. Apparently the author had been in contact with Mike shortly before Mike's death to discuss submission of this story. Thankfully he was able to get hold of @Alien Son more recently to renew the discussion and get the story published. We'll never know if other stories were circulating in Mike's email before his death. R
  4. I found the story very engaging. I wonder how it ended up being posted anonymously? Perhaps I should try to contact this author and confirm permission to post. R
  5. Sadly, we never even learn the young man's name. R
  6. In the course of trying to put Codey's World back together, I discovered a whole group of stories by "guest and anonymous authors" that had been assembled more than 15 years ago and had since vanished from the site. Thanks to the "Wayback Machine" web archive, I have been able to rescue several of these stories and return them to the CW site. I decided to read one of them, entitled "A Halloween Surprise," found here. The author is apparently anonymous -- there are no hints as to who it is. I thought it was a pretty good story. The hidden information seems to indicate that it was originally posted in February, 2007. So far I have rescued four stories, linked here, but I discovered a short while ago that there are two more that I missed. Probably won't get to those until tomorrow at the soonest.
  7. And here it is. Wherein we learn about chest hair, shaving, skateboards, and acrobatic dogs, among other things. Amazing the education available at AwesomeDude. R
  8. Find it here. Those pesky red envelopes will get you every time. R
  9. Located here. I had a feeling of deja vu reading this story, and realized that it was because I had looked at it a few days ago over at Codey's World (where it has been posted for some time) in the course of cleaning up pages over there. I still liked it the second time! R
  10. Found here. A certifiably appropriate Valentine's Day story. R
  11. I'm going to have to stop tinkering with all the technical stuff and take time to catch up with all the new stories that are appearing! Rumors of the death of AwesomeDude seem to be greatly exaggerated. 😎 R
  12. Not like you've been busy or anything . . . R
  13. What John said. When we resurrected AwesomeDude on January 4th, I edited the CW home page and a couple of other general pages to replace links to codeysworld.com with links to awesomedude.org/codeysworld/ (the directory on the AD server). But I did not go through and make similar changes on all the CW story pages, because I foresaw (correctly, as it turns out) that we might just have to change them all again in the near future. When I woke up this past Tuesday morning to find an email from John stating that he had managed to snap up the just-expired codeysworld.org domain, I swung into action. Although I had recently downloaded the entire codeysworld/ directory to my local drive, I made a fresh download that morning. I then went through and separated all the author folders into a work directory on my local drive just for them. I then went through and made a detailed edit of the CW home page, updating links and email addresses. I also edited several other general pages such as the Submissions page, Kewl Stuff, and Resources for Teens. When I uploaded these to the new server space, it allowed me to begin the process of identifying dependencies of files, such as images and PHP includes, to these pages. Through this process, I was able to segregate more than half a gigabyte of stuff that was sitting in the CW directory taking up space but was not actively in use. I was then able to use the Aba Search & Replace program on the entire contents of the work directory for the author pages. Primarily I was able to bulk-replace all instances of "webguys@codeysworld.com" with "webguys@codeysworld.org," and all instances of "codeysworld.com" with "codeysworld.org." I then uploaded all of the modified author files to the new codeysworld.org server space. I had to create the mailbox for "webguys@codeysworld.org" on the new hosting space, as well as for "submissions@codeysworld.org." I also discovered that I needed to copy over a site navigation CSS file from AwesomeDude that the CW story pages all depended on. This made the CW pages self-sufficient, without having to link to something on the AD site. I did some spot-checking and it seemed like things were generally working, much to my relief. That's when I posted the announcement about the move at the start of this topic. Meanwhile, for the moment, all the leftover stuff from the old CW directory is in a non-public archive directory on our server in case we ever need it. Because I knew there were some links to the codeysworld/ directory in a few of the AD authors' page, and because it seemed silly to try to maintain two parallel instances of CW, I replaced the index page in the codeysworld/ directory with a new page that uses a meta Refresh directive in the head to send visitors to the new codeysworld.org site. There is text stating that the visitor is being redirected, which shows for a brief moment, and the text includes a hard link to the new site in case the redirect fails for some reason. I pulled off the rest of the content in the codeysworld/ directory on the AD server, but as mentioned above it's all safe and sound on the codeysworld.org server. The short answer to your question, however, is: Yes, please change all links pointing to awesomedude.org/codeysworld/ to point to codeysworld.org. That will save visitors from having to sit through the redirect. In the fullness of time I assume John and I will update the handful of other AD author pages that have the interim links to CW, but in the meantime we can sleep well knowing that the redirect is there. The other thing I have done is to create a CW-based home for LitlleBuddhaTW on the Codey's World site. Previously, the CW author page simply pointed to the AD author page, and sent people to AD with no navigation back to CW. Now it's fully integrated into CW. John and I are endeavoring to repair instances where graphics have disappeared, etc. Undoubtedly, all these trips through FTP have created occasional mutations in the code. Thankfully there are a wealth of previous snapshots of the CW site on the Wayback Machine archive, and so far we have managed to rescue things that had gone missing. Please let us know of any glitches that come to light. R
  14. The Codey's World site has moved to a slightly different domain name, codeysworld.org. There are still some rough edges but overall the site is functioning in its new abode. We are still looking for one or more people to take on management of the site. R
  15. The "awesome" team of @Alien Son and yours truly swung into action today and grabbed the domain name "codeysworld.org" that had just expired. Everyone can now go to https://codeysworld.org to visit the site -- it is no longer piggybacked as a part of the AwesomeDude site. Now, some caveats are in order: 1. While I was able to update the vast majority of internal links to reflect the new domain name, as well as the new AwesomeDude domain name, chances are there are still some stray broken links. 2. A number of pictures accompanying stories or author pages have simply disappeared. We have had some success is restoring missing images using the Wayback Machine web archive, but that is a slow and tedious process that may not happen quickly. 3. There are authors (e.g., LittleBuddhaTW) who are listed on the authors page but for whom there was nothing on the server when we moved everything. Again, we may be able to resurrect whatever was there using the web archive, but that will be a slow process at best. And we may never manage to recover what might have been there. 4. A number of authors had email aliases forwarded through codeysworld.com. We have no record of what the underlying author addresses may have been. Accordingly, you are on your own trying to contact such authors. 5. Some pages on CW have a "discuss" link that once opened a discussion board on that site. This discussion board is defunct and the "discuss" links will fail. At this point we have only spot-checked the new site, but generally things seem to be working. The address to report technical problems is webguys@codeysworld.org. This email goes to both @Alien Son and me. We still need to figure out a long-term plan for this site. But this change will simplify administration of things like email addresses going forward. Cheers, R
  16. After a previous storm a few days ago, it started raining again yesterday (Sunday Feb. 4) around 1:00 PM and now, almost 30 hours later, the rain is still coming down. (I'm in the San Fernando/San Gabriel Valley area of Los Angeles.) Even my yellow Lab, who (like most Labs) normally loves water, has decided this is a bit too much for him. My specific location is relatively flat and has adequate drainage. But the people living in the nearby hills are undoubtedly pretty worried. R
  17. Happy Saturday, everyone (except for @Alien Son in Australia where it is already Sunday)! One month after D-Day (Dark Day) it seems appropriate to review where we stand, what has been accomplished, and what things still need attention. When Mike passed away in September, 2023, we knew we would have problems because he took the critical login credentials for AwesomeDude and Codey's World to the grave with him. The site was still operational because the annual hosting fee had been paid, but we could see that the domain name would expire in December unless renewed, and we had no information about the hosting service finances. None of these places would talk to us without proper credentials, which we did not have. We spent the final months of 2023 working with Mike's adopted son to try to discover the missing credentials, using a variety of approaches. None of them worked. In December, 2023, however, the awesomedude.com domain registration renewed . . . we assume because of an auto-renew setting that drew money from the PayPal account that Mike had set up. We crossed our fingers and hoped that the hosting account would also auto-renew, but it did not . . . hence the site blackout at the beginning of January. Thankfully, we had done what we could to prepare for this eventuality. @Alien Son had downloaded a complete backup of the site (which included both AwesomeDude and Codey's World content) to his local computer in November, just in case. Another AD forum member registered the name "awesomedude.org" just in case. And because this forum stayed on the air, @TalonRider was able to configure a private forum where a core group could communicate to share ideas and work out what needed to be done, and by whom, to get something back on the air. It was a joint effort. @Alien Son opened up a new hosting account, and sent me the login credentials. The member who had registered "awesomedude.org" sent both of us the login credentials for that registrar. I used these credentials to marry the new domain name to the new hosting service, and watched it populate around the world using a DNS propagation monitoring tool. (It's actually very cool to watch this happening.) @Alien Son then began the arduous process of uploading the full site backup he had on his hard disk to the new web server. This took many hours, but thankfully the old site reappeared in substantially intact form (as we expected it would). Of course, nothing is that easy. The existing story files in the AwesomeDude area had thousands of hard-coded internal links based on awesomedude.com, such as the "next chapter" buttons at the bottom of story pages. Clicking on these would generate a "404 Not Found" error. So we needed to fix all of those. Over the next two or three days, @Alien Son and I each took one-half of the alphabet of AD authors, downloaded their files, and used a powerful search-and-replace tool to substitute awesomedude.org everywhere awesomedude.com appeared. We also took care of some other issues while we had the files available to tinker with. We then returned the updated files to the server. This involved tens of thousands of file roundtrips. That pretty much brings us up to date as far as the story areas on AD are concerned. There are still some isolated issues lurking on some pages. As a general rule, the newer the story, the more likely it is problem free. But some of the pages date back almost twenty years, and there are still some lurking anomalies. Anyone who finds a broken link or other anomalous behavior is encouraged to let us know by emailing dude@awesomedude.org. That brings us to Codey's World. As many are aware, that area has been neglected in recent months because the longtime curator of that area stopped dealing with it. The URL "codeysworld.com" no longer works. The domain name itself was registered by Mike in 2006, and will expire in August 2024. We have no access to the domain registration account for that name either. Until the blackout, the codeysworld.com URL pointed to a directory on the old AwesomeDude server, and that directory is still intact on our new server. You can now access Codey's World at https;//www.awesomedude.org/codeysworld/. There are a lot of broken links in that area, however, and it has not been updated for many months. The workaround for broken links is to substitute awesomedude.org/codeysworld/ for codeysworld.com/ in the broken link. In the coming months, however, we need to decide what should become of the Codey's World content, and who will take charge of it. Suggestions are welcome. Meanwhile, as folks will have seen, @Alien Son has set up a new PayPal donation link that appears on the main AD home page and in the footer on this forum. We are grateful for the donations that have come in. The remaining major area of concern is this message forum. Again, we do not have Mike's credentials as owner of the forum license. However, we do have a side-door portal in that Mike made @TalonRider a deputy administrator (or whatever it's called). @TalonRider gets a notification whenever a bill goes out to Mike for this forum. It's about $30 per month. The most recent month was paid through Mike's existing payment arrangement -- again, presumably, something tied to the old PayPal donation account -- but we have no idea whether or for how much longer that will continue. @TalonRider thinks that his own credit card is on standby to pay the AD forum cost, but we have not had to test that yet. The big challenge comes because Invision, the company providing the forum software, recently revised its product offerings and raised its prices considerably. We are still grandfathered under the old pricing scheme that Mike had, and hopefully that will continue. We are also on version 4 of the forum product, which is perfectly satisfactory, but Invision now has version 5 with many more bells and whistles, none of which we need. If we had to switch to a new version 5 license, our monthly cost would nearly double (at a minimum). We are therefore trying our best not to rock the boat with this arrangement. We have had one happy breakthrough involving the forum -- it appears we have finally figured out how to stem the flood of bogus forum registrations coming in from spambots. We still need to have new registrants email us to let us know that they have submitted a registration -- for some reason, the initial confirmation email is not going out. If you know of anyone who has tried to register without success, please have them email dude@awesomedude.org with information about who they are so we can find them among the thousands of spambot pending registrations. The major takeaway from all of this is that now there are at least two people having relevant login credentials for all the services we are using. Moreover, not only does @Alien Son continue to pull site backups to his computer, I have also set up my own Google Drive account to receive weekly site backups from the web host. In addition, the web host pulls its own periodic backups. Sorry for the TL;DR. Hopefully this information will be useful to everyone. R
  18. Hmmm -- I'm kind of underwhelmed by the writing (lots and lots of passive voice) and the angst. Not sure how far I will venture. R
  19. This is a great story, and ticks many of the best boxes. It is always gratifying to see a young protagonist rise to the occasion with pluck and resources he never knew he had. And the story wraps up with a significant amount of justice being received by the villains (in at least three separate contexts). If it was a movie there would be loud cheering in the theater at several points. Good job. R
  20. OK, I have the first one on my Kindle and it's in my reading rotation! R
  21. I can't believe a school system would not make an exception for twins born minutes apart. R
  22. Me again. Has anyone ventured into Patricia Cornwell's "Scarpetta" series? Worth taking time with? R
  23. This has always been on my short list of favorite AD stories. R
  24. Cute story. I can't imagine any of my algebra teachers coming anywhere near such a lesson. R
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