Author Archives: Librarian

2024-06-20

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PHP HELP 

Looking for some PHP help. I’m trying to set up the Book Search page to check for books added since a specific date. It’s been a LOT of years since I did any serious PHP coding and I no longer have the patience I used to have for dealing with syntax errors and malformed statements. (No longer have hair to pull out.)

I need maybe a dozen and a half line of code. What I need to do is

  1. ask for Year in a select statement (2024-2020)
  2. ask for a month (01-12)
  3. concatenate them into yyyy-mm-01
  4. call another php page passing that date in the URL.

The second age making the database queries I can handle just fine. If anyone fluent in PHP could help out I’d really appreciate it.

The Librarian

 

SATURDAY 2024-06-15 (evening)

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NEW SITE STATUS

Managed to miss some obvious stuff. Some of the menu links were broken. I had left a Meta data block on the side bar and the Contact form was broken. Those are fixed now.

There’s no login/registration function anywhere at the moment. Seems I broke that yesterday and didn’t realize it. I’ll get that fixed this weekend sometime.

The important thing is that the book Index is working, the Category pages are working and all of the files are online and downloadable. That’s the Core function of the site so as long as that is working the rest is lower priority.

All the 301 redirects have been added so old links will work properly.

For now I’m off to bed to dream about PHP syntax and variables if I’m unlucky.

The Librarian

p.s. if you do see something not working please let me know either through the contact form or by just emailing me at librarian@survivorlibrary.com

SATURDAY 2024-06-15

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WELCOME TO THE NEW SITE

The new site is live. Basic design and layout is similar to the old site. Minimalist since listing and downloading books is not a high tech function and doesn’t need a lot of bells and whistles to perform it’s function

Only real difference is that there are a lot of capabilities available in the new software which I have not begun to make much use of yet and the up to date software will make maintaining the site a LOT easier.

A few things are clearly different since the Category pages are sortable and have a Date Added field for each book. That will make it easier to see new material when it is added. I’m planning to add some PHP code and a new page that will let you enter a date and will dynamically show you everything added after that date. That will make Catch-Up easier. Probably be at least a few weeks before that is added. My PHP skills are not just rusty but severely corroded and need to be brought back up to snuff.

I know there are still some bugs, mostly formatting items, that still need to be addressed and I’ll be working on those over the next few days.

But the main migration is complete… for now.

The Librarian

MONDAY 06/03/2024

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MONDAY 06/03/2024
WORK ON NEW SITE BEGINNING
Setting up the Server for the new version of the website. Too hot to do much outside anyway. It’s a Dell R710, Duel; Xeon processors, 96GB ram, Server 2019 Standard, 1-2TB Raid 5 drive space, IIS10, PHP 8.3.7, MySQL 8, Joomla 5 and a lot of other odds and ends.
Yes I know Linux and Apache is better so don’t even start. I’ve run hundreds of websites in both environments over the last 40+ years. But my Linux skills have atrophied over the years and I just do not have the patience to relearn all that Linux esoterica yet again for the hundredth time. So it’s going to run on Windows Server 2019 and IIS 10.
One of the features I’ll be adding that was just too difficult to add in the old site is each Category being in a sortable table. I’ll add a column that shows when each item was added. Everything already on the site I’ll just date 2024/1/1.
New individuals items will have the date they are added and the list can be sorted on that column. I’m going to try to add the ability to simply search for all new items after a certain date so you can find everything that’s been added since. That will depend on how quickly I regain my PHP programming skills which are quite rusty.
Would like to add a column so that people can leave comments or reviews of any books or books and those would be accessible from the book list. Again… dependent on the level of my PHP language skills.
Please feel free to suggest anything else that would be useful since I’m pretty much starting from scratch on the new version of the site. Other than the book names, sizes and links and some of the static text content of some other pages I’m working form a blank slate.
The Librarian

SATURDAY 06/01/2024

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SATURDAY 06/01/2024

MIGRATION TO NEW SERVER COMPLETE

The site is now running on it’s new server at the house here. It’s a Dell T410, 32gb, with a few SAS drives in it. Plugged into a 4 battery APC battery backup.

The performance seems better than the old virtual server at the hosting company. I have a 1GB fiber line so don’t expect any bandwidth issues. If too many people start downloading all at once I might have to throttle the bandwidth since my wife uses that line for her job so she makes the rules on bandwidth use.

I THINK everything got tested and is working correctly. But after 40+ years doing this stuff I know better than to speak in absolutes about such things. If you do encounter anything that doesn’t work correctly, bad links, 404 Page Not Found errors and the like, please let me know. 

The files are there and can be downloaded and that is the primary thing.

Now that it’s here I’ll be setting up the target server for the new site (Dell R710 128gb) where it will ultimately reside. Probably do that this next week and start installing all the base software packages AMP, MySQL, PHPO, Perk, Python, SEVERAL CMS packages since #I will probably move away form the current CMS the site is running. But that will be an ongoing process this summer. 

Weird to be doing all this while my phone keeps pinging SMS alerts of the newest X-Class flare being tossed out by the sun.

The Librarian