New Forum?

[Bill Simmeth]

FWIW, The promise of a separate area for Shop Tours at SMC is pre July 2003. Hope it happens someday!

Goodness! Aren't you a ray of sunshine this morning? I think the SMC crew has accomplished quite a bit considering it's a non-paying, after hours sorta thing!

[Frank Pellow]

This is an old subject that we need to touch on every now and then to remind everyone that SMC will have a shop tours area in the near future. The details are in the works as our Administrator Aaron Koehl is putting together a list of functions and features for the SMC shop tour Module
...

Keith, what you have told us of the details so far sound great.

I am particularly interested in the "tool" database. Right now, I am administering such a database for the Festool Owner Group on Yahoo and the Yahoo database tools are archaic. I certainly hope that Aaron has something better to work with here. On second thought, of course, Aaron has sopmething better to work with -there can't be anything else as primative as the Yahoo "so called" database facilities.

[Keith Outten]

Frank,

MYSQL runing on Linux should do the trick. It has served us well for a very long time in dozens of high-end applications.

Steve,

We had hoped to find the funds to create a shop tours module in 2003 but our plans fell through. After that we were just happy to be able to keep the Creek online, when Hampton Roads Online started downhill about that time frame the outlook was very dismall. In fact the Creek was just one week away from being unplugged when John Bailey saved the day in late October.

The last two years have been a major struggle trying to pay the bills to keep HRO open and keep the Creek up without any funds. When the SMC server needed to be replaced it was a small group of our Members that came to our rescue and helped us fund the new server that we are running now.

Our situation today is 180 degrees out from last October, we are sound financially and there is nothing but blue skys overhead and to be totally honest I would have never believed it possible. I have always used the phrase "We Are Running On Friendship" because it has been true since day one.

Once again I will be glad to say thanks to everyone for saving the Creek just a few short months ago. HRO is now just a memory, ten years of hard work gone forever but the Creek is alive and well and I am thankfull for that.

.

[Frank Pellow]

Frank,

MYSQL runing on Linux should do the trick. It has served us well for a very long time in dozens of high-end applications.

Great, I have used MYSQL and it certainly should be able to handle the job!

[Bob Swenson]

And to think I started my electronic life moving a cats whisker over a crystal.
That was after I was a waiter at the last supper.
You guys are great.

[Aaron Koehl]

Thanks, Bill. It is a part-time endeavor, and as the 'Creek grows, it becomes more and more worthwhile to invest the effort into nice customizations. For a while, vBulletin was changing their template system every couple of months, making even small customizations into a maintenance hassle.

Jack, a link database is a maintenance nightmare, not to mention lack of consistency across the sites, and those extra features you can get when the data is stored together. Additionally, I for one am sick of ads, which is one of the reasons I enjoy running and visiting SMC so much. I wouldn't want any part of SawmillCreek, distributed or not, to be ad-filled. I don't see it as a small price. Not to mention, without control over the content, we're simply shooting out links and it quickly becomes a spam-link-database. We try not to do things halfway.. all or nothing- (that's not to say we can't phase things in!)