More News! Codey's World Now Has Its Own Domain Again

[Rutabaga]

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

 

[Cole Parker]

You guys do like to keep busy, don't you?

WELL DONE!

[Alien Son]

I have to point out that Rutabaga did the lion's share of this work. By the time I registered the domain it was approaching midnight here.

Rutabaga took over and by the time I was up and about again he was well into moving all the CW content to the new address. Much appreciated, R.

~ John

[Altimexis]

I have a link to the CW subdirectory at AD in the header and footer of many of my stories, but it still works. Should I globally change the links to the new CW domain?

[Alien Son]

Rutabaga has set up a redirect that should take care of that. Any URL that leads to the old CW directory on the AD site will automatically be sent to codeysworld.org.

In the long term it would be good if you could update the links.  (I assume you're referring to your stories posted on the AD site and not those posted on the CW site.)

If you're referring to your stories at CW, it might be worth checking to see if they still show the old address because Rutabaga did a search and replace operation on the whole CW site and updated all the links he could find.

~ John

[Rutabaga]

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