I have been programming ColdFusion for business applications for 15 years and
would love to take over the IRTC and host the site for free as well. Please
contact me. Most of the sites I programmed are internal business tracking sites.
Other than that I have storefronts for Carlile, BP, Conoco Phillips, and a host
of other major Alaskan companies. In the past I worked on some PovRay graphics
and do love the community. All I would need is a list of services needed for the
site, requirements, etc.. This can be completed in a couple of weeks if not
sooner since this is actually very simple programming to me. Let me know.



David Buck <dav### [at] simberoncom> wrote:
> I understand your frustration.  Here's my perspective:
>
> I volunteered my time for a period of about a year to re-develop the
> IRTC site since nobody else was stepping up to the plate.  If I was
> going to rewrite the site software, it would at least be in a language
> which I like and understand well.  That's why I chose Smalltalk.  If
> anyone else volunteers to take over the project and rewrite the code,
> you can use any language you wish.
>
> The project became more complicated when Chris Cason expressed the
> desire to make the pages bookmarkable and google-indexable. The site was
> developed in Seaside which normally puts session keys into the URLS.
> Making the pages bookmarkable changed this policy and made the coding
> harder.  It also meant that users browsing the site without logging in
> used a new session for every page hit.
>
> After finally making the site live and struggling to correct problems
> amidst much complaining from the community, we got the software stable
> except for one nagging problem. The web sessions are always set to
> time-out.  In order to give people enough time to submit images without
> timing out, we had to increase the timeout to 30 minutes.  But, to allow
> the site to be navigable without logging in and to be bookmarkable,
> every page view created a new session.  The combination of these two
> factors meant that lots of hits by users who weren't logged in would
> create lots of sessions and eat up lots of memory.  The application was
> chewing up too much memory and was causing problems with the server.
>
> I'm now super busy with several contracts at once and have no time to
> volunteer any more to the IRTC.  On top of that, the number of
> submissions had dropped to about 6 per competition which meant that
> every submission won something (which is kind of meaningless).  We felt
> that the lack of interest and the memory issue was too much to keep the
> application running.
>
> Now, if anyone out there wants to take it over, be my guest.  I can make
> all of the Smalltalk code available to you if you wish.  You can also
> re-write it in PHP or any other language you like.  I just can't spend
> more time on it because I'm already too busy working on other stuff.
>
> I tried, folks, but the rewards were too small, the effort was too high,
> and the complaints from people not satisfied with the efforts we put in
> were too annoying.
>
> I'd be happy to help anyone take over, but my volunteer time on this
> project is done.
>
> David Buck

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