[theforum] Zombie!

[David]

Hi Neuro!

On 6/2/13 10:42 AM, William Anderson wrote:
> Hello fellow evolt-type peoples!
>
> To paraphrase that learned scholar, the renowned Professor Elmer J.
> Fudd PhD, things are vewy vewy quiet! :)

I'll say!

> I have a suggestion just as I've both reactivated my evolt.org
> donation subscription (Dave K, for your books, $20/month sir!) and
> have been working on reconstructing the Browser Archive to include
> funky stuff like external mirrors to nominally save us space and
> increase our coverage (I'm hoping to get some stuff into github soon).

Thanks for both kinds of contributions.  This makes you evolt's largest 
financial benefactor *and* most productive worker :-)

> But the suggestion comes loaded with some sticky questions, and a
> gentle reminder.

[snipping sticky bits]

> Dave, how are the finances doing?

Muddling along, all on donations these days.  We have:

Assets:

   $320 USD in the bank
     50 USD in the PayPal Account

Income:
	
   Donations: Between 3 and 5 monthly subscriptions most for $10
   (they fluctuate a bit)

   Google Adsense revenue: Average $175 per year (2009 - 2012)

Expenses:

   SoftLayer (Hosting): $45 /month
   GoDaddy ~ $20 / year (two domains: evolt.org and evolters.org)


> Folks, why are core evolt.org pages not being rendered without
> authenticating first? (I had to sign in to reach the donate page!)

The Drupal user table keeps getting corrupted, causing uid 0 to become 
associated with a (newly registered, semi-random) authenticated user 
account that has a password.  I have fixed this several times in the 
past.  Drupal so sucks.

> Are we considering doing the upgrade to the latest version of Drupal,
> whatever that may be?

See above :-)

> Are we going to reconsider our hosting platform to save some money?  I
> think the hosting bill is still around the ~ $45 a month mark, a cost
> which could get us a virtual machine with similar if not increased
> storage on Amazon Web Services[...]
> I think AWS makes more sense, especially
> considering the price.

+1 for moving to Amazon EC2

FYI: IBM Just bought our (most recent) web hosting provider, SoftLayer 
(which bought ou account from the ThePlanet, which bought us from 
ServerMatrix)

I can't stomach the idea of hosting evolt with the Men in Black at IBM...

> Are we considering mothballing the evolt.org project due to lack of
> activity on several fronts?  The website is still there, albeit
> fixably broken.  The browser archive is still there, and I think with
> a bit of help I can make it really great, partly because it's a vital
> resource, and also because I don't want to let Adrian's legacy of
> creating it in the first place go to waste.  The lists are still
> there, with thelist and thechat still getting some conversations
> going.  The last post in here was over a year ago.

+1 for converting weo content into a static "snapshot" of all the great 
articles of the past.  The word "mothballing", to me, has connotations 
of hiding it in a closet under old boxes of magazines, never to be found 
again :-)  but i get your point of extracting the content from the 
(shudders) cms software in which it is currently imprisoned.

> I know some/most of us have moved on from web design, but that surely
> doesn't mean this community needs to slowly fizzle out.

+1 to no fizzle

> Perhaps we
> can laser focus back on creating a great web design community?
> Perhaps not solely relying on just mailing lists and submitted
> articles?

+1 to laser focusing on lists

What happened to the google ads on leo?

I'm all for just making weo an alias for leo and then making leo more 
searchable and browseable and perusable...

> We have done great things together.  Let's do some more.

+1 to more goof! (I mean good)

-dave

PS: Why does the subject of this thread reference the undead?  Oh, never 
mind.  Now that I ask the question I get it.