www.sl-prokeys.com

sl-prokeys was born April 5, 1995

Wes Garland: Webmaster


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19790139
total sl-prokeys hits since April, 2003

On Thursday, August 21, 2003, at 2:45pm, my wife of 34 years, Rebecca, died in my arms in an emergency room.

The last words we spoke were in perfect synchronization: "I love you with all my heart."

 

Facts About sl-prokeys


COPYRIGHT NOTICE REGARDING THIS WEBSITE - PLEASE READ CAREFULLY

Prokeys was created in 1995.  I recall registering the name "sl-prokeys" because "prokeys" was not available. 

In the beginning, it was a tiny website with just a few pages, located on the space allocated by our ISP.  I think we were allowed about 2mb of disk space back then.  That was way back in the days when 56k dialup was "state of the art"!  I remember an internal 56k modem used to cost about $99.00.  Now you can buy them for $4.00.

In those early days, I think we had written 4 or 5 pages about Hammond organs, and I was struggling to learn to use a webpage editor.  Rebecca gave me a lot of help, though she'd never created a website before.  I remember the very first editor was the "live, online" one, where you choose a template, they give you a page, and you try and make it work.  It didn't work very well.  Then we found an editor in Netscape.  Since then, I've "graduated" to Front Page. 

As soon as cable modem was available, we were the 18th subscriber to Tampabay Roadrunner.  We signed up the same day they publicly accepted subscribers.  Our website was then moved there, into the 5mb of space allowed for each subscriber.  Thanks to all the extra space, a lot more Hammond organ, and several other, webpages were written.

In time, we used up most of the 5mb, and discussed paying for a webhosting company.  In those days, 10-20mb was pretty much average for a basic website. 

We decided to do it.  For about $60.00 per year, we moved our website to a real webhosting company, and we made a lot of discoveries. 

With that much space, we would be able to put a lot of pictures online, so most of our pages soon had pictures - not just text.  We also learned how to get music online, and mp3s started appearing on our site.

And we could install scripts, page counters, message boards ...... all kinds of things we didn't know anything about.  But the point was, the webhost provided support for these options, unlike the space provided by our ISP.

In the early days, we used page counters which were publicly provided.  Several companies offered free counters, but they "hosted" these additions on their servers. 

As time went on, we changed webhosting companies a few times.  Times were changing, and the hosting packages were improving.  What began as a 10mb webspace soon became 10 gigabytes, for about the same yearly price.  A few years ago, we went with a different hosting company.   

Our entire website, (current as of March, 2012), including everything - all the pages, pictures, slideshows, music files, and videos, plus many support files - is currently using about 7 gigabytes of the (unlimited) capacity allowed.

AXS Visitor Tracking Program

I also discovered XAV.com, a website written by Zoltan, the author of several excellent script programs which we immediately began using.  The best - in our application - is his AXS Visitor Tracking program.  With AXS, you get a pretty good idea of exactly what each visitor does.  AXS logs each page hit, and shows time and date, so you can "see" what each visitor is interested in. 

COUNT Program

In April, 2003, Dr. Debug - a friend named Roger - finally wrote a COUNT program that actually worked consistently.  Before then, we were using a similar program, but it went crazy every few days, and lost 50,000 or 180,000 hits for reasons we never figured out.  Until Roger came up with several genius ideas, the COUNT program was too unreliable, and caused plenty of aggravation.  Roger is another super programmer, and comes up with really brilliant ideas.  So far, we haven't devised the way to process all of our old log files and adjust the COUNT data. 

Now, in 2007, our website has grown a little.  We currently have about 892 .htm webpages, but the vast majority of them are slideshow pages.  The program we discovered to make slideshows generates a tiny .htm page for each picture you want in the slideshow.  Examples are the SCAMP slideshow, (~335 .htm pages), the GOLDCROWN slideshow, (~135 .htm pages), and the STAX slideshow, which generated ~83 .htm pages.  There are other slideshows, too.  As you can see, the number 892 could be slightly misunderstood.  One important point: the slideshows have no counters and no tracking code.  I don't have a clue if they've been viewed a hundred times, or a million times - there's just no way of knowing.

Our real webpages - the ones that people actually read (sometimes) - are closer to 200.  During the last few years, I've noticed that AXS typically logs about 15,000 visitors each month.  The AXS log will never stop growing, so each month, I have to delete the previous month.  It's easy enough to do, but a typical pain in the neck. 

A different program, Web Log Expert, which I like and use a lot, frequently shows over 15,000 hits each day.  This program does count hits to other items, such as pictures and music files, but I believe it's obsolete.  However, I still like and use it.


UPDATE January, 2008: We made plenty of errors during testing, but we finally found the correct way to process all our ARCHIVED LOGS.  Once we figured out how, processing is actually pretty easy.  It's done with several DOS batch files which only find certain matches and ignore everything else.  The entire job should take less than 8 hours. 

We decided to take all the old logs, process them for hits that were not counted from April, 2003 through December, 2007. That's 56 months of log files - several gigabytes of logs! 

We came to the decision to make this a simpler process than we originally planned.  The results will add the missed hits to some special LINK files.  The page counters will remain just as they were.

Instead of changing all the page counters, which would take weeks - possibly months - of editing and intense script programming, we'll add some new files to the COUNT program, and leave it at that. 

Update should take place by February 1, 2008

Update complete: January 29, 2008

special thanks to Dr. Debug, Zoltan, and Chris for the script code!


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