2008 calc.org revival

[Ben Trettel]

More information on calc.org.

[Ben Trettel]

I thought that at least someone would find this interesting, but I suppose I was wrong.

The easiest way to help out is to report bad program information or broken program links. I've been fixing them as I've found them, but I can't find them all by myself. Broken links I am going to find when I add the 300 programs from the new database and the old user database. Sadly, only a few people have reported programs, so I know that not everyone is browsing the database.

My plan at the moment is to slowly add features until we approach a good workable website. I'm okay with doing this by myself because I know sufficient PHP and MySQL to write a good program script.

The next planned step is to merge the old database (what is online) with the 300 or so programs that were in the newer database. To do this I'll have to change the database structure by adding more fields and the users table from the newer database. The file structure will change at this point as well. Manually, this step would have taken a very long time, but it should only take a few hours if I use a script. A guy I know said he'll help me with this, so I don't need any help. This could take anywhere from a week to a month depending on my schedule.

I don't want to go into too much detail as to ruin the surprises I have. I do have a lot of ideas and calc.org will have a noticeably different take on program archives than all other websites. It'll be an uphill battle to catch up to much more current archives like here, ticalc.org, and Calcgames, but I think I can do it.

If anyone wants to help at all, let me know. No experience is required for some of the jobs I have. The most major job I have planned is going through the programs without a database entry to add to the database. Since I plan on making a web administration to simplify this, no programming experience is necessary, but access to an emulator to test the programs and lots of free time is.

[elfprince13]

would you like some sort of spiderbot to find broken links for you?

[Ben Trettel]

The original plan was to use wget to find broken download links, but after some thought it would be easier to detect them when merging the databases and moving files. I didn't explain this fully. The file structure will change from http://www.calc.org/files/category/file to http://www.calc.org/files/X/file. This is necessary because I want to use different categories and some files can be used on multiple calculators. Because I will automate the moving of files with a script, reporting broken links would be easy.

If you want to run some sort of spider on what I have right now, go ahead. Anything would help. I've found that the majority of missing files are misnamed. Very few missing files I have not been able to find with a minute of searching. The few ones that are completely missing I doubt were uploaded correctly, but that's just speculation.

For the problem reports other than broken links I'm interested in bad characters. Some of the characters in author names and the descriptions are coming up funny.

[Weregoose]

[Ben Trettel]

I hadn't explained fully again. The result of the bad encoding is in the database (i.e. é is in the database rather than é). I should be able to do a search and replace to fix it if I had a list, but it might be just as easy to fix them as they are noticed.

I'll add that to the header though because it couldn't hurt. Thanks.

[benryves]

It looks like the database is storing the strings correctly (well, it's storing the values as UTF- - maybe the database tool you're using doesn't handle UTF-8 correctly, or the database table character encoding is set to a single-byte encoding?

Either way, it's sending valid UTF-8 to the browser, so Weregoose's fix will fix it

[Ben Trettel]

Yeah, after I added the encoding code, the author names were fixed. I was fairly certain the names were entered as the non-encoded characters (i.e. é is in the database rather than é), but they weren't. That's good to know because it saves a lot of time. Thanks a bunch again.

The main problem now appears to be broken download links and screenshots, which as I said will be noted by a script when I switch the URL structure.

Some programs still have some minor problems, like this one: http://www.calc.org/program/2619

For some reason the apostrophes are escaped where they shouldn't be. I don't know if that was a mistake when I entered this database, but it's there on a few programs.

[Ben Trettel]

I'm going to put some sort of blog up on calc.org to help people track my progress.

Right now I'm fixing problems with the subdomains. All of the old hosted websites now point towards my water gun website. This is screwing me up in the search engines. Do a Google search for super soaker and you'll see what I mean. My website went down from 4 to 8 and now my website's homepage doesn't rank any longer. That can't be good.

Edit: Most every subdomain gives a 403 message now. joewing.calc.org redirects to sscentral.org to hopefully set Google right. Once Google gets the message I'll switch joewing.calc.org to a 403.

[Ben Trettel]

Just a note that I've made a public calc.org development forum that will serve as the basis for the remainder of the website: http://www.calc.org/forum/

That is not likely to the be the final location of any discussion board we might have, but it's a good place to discuss calc.org further. I will post updates there as opposed to on the homepage now.

Old calc.org passwords should still work because OvBB (the forum I installed) and calc.org used the same encoding scheme, but if you have no success, try the password recovery system. If that doesn't work because you've changed your email address or don't know your username, create a new account. I'll work things out later.