What is the status of the "Survivors List"? It was pulled some months ago for some fix-it work, and has been MIA since!

Any prospects for its reappearance on the website? I hope so!

Aaron Dowling

-- Aaron Dowling (adowling@merandb.com), September 30, 2004

Answers

I linked the Survivors List back into the Web site today. To view the Survivors List come to

http://aclsal.org

The List was removed recently because for the past few months the operation of adding a post or a comment to the database has been unreliable. The operation would work for some users and not for others, for example.

This change in behavior coincided with a decision by our Web Site host to change from a Linux platform to a Windows platform. They copied our code from the one computer to the other. This is fine for HTML Web pages, but for database code this was unfortunately like moving a five-foot gauge rail car to a standard gauge line. Instantly all the code no longer functioned.

Over the course of a few weeks I was able to port the code to the new platform, and any operation that involved simply viewing the data worked fine. However, any operation that tried to change the database behind the list was flaky at best. Even worse, the code sometimes worked one day and failed the next because a patch would come along that changed the security configuration at the host.

The best solution I have for minimizing everyone's aggravation is to change the add operation to be by email. Once I receive an email I can insert the data into the database and it will appear in the list. This is reliable.

Beyond these technical issues, I have made some changes based on comments from loyal list contributors. The layout of the page is now changed and the page now conforms better to the design of other pages on the site.

The layout has also been simplified. There a table that shows the most recent entries followed by one table for each major category of equipment - locomotives, freight cars, passenger cars and cabooses.

I will keep working on trying to get the list to support direct addition, but will have to be satisfied it is working before releasing the code. It causes great aggravation when code works intermittently.

Your comments welcome.

Sincerely, Ron. Wright

-- Ron. Wright (ron@cofg.org), October 08, 2004.

Well, as the "retired" webmaster (temporarily), you'll have to ask Ron Wright...his email address appears somewhere on the front forum page where the messages come up. Only HE knows how it works. I never did.

-- Buck Dean (abdean@comcast.net), October 05, 2004.