Archive : About this site

urrently this web site is hosted on a Dell Dimension 8100 computer running Windows 2000 Server. The computer, bandwidth and space all graciously on loan from Case Western Reserve University. There are five email mailing lists hosted on a different university computer by Donasian called Cleftlist. The lists are: Archery, Cleftlist, Dance, Scribes, and a list for the CWRU Medieval Society. To subscribe to any of the email mailing lists, email cleftlist-request@cleftlist.cwru.edu.

Connection statistics are available on the statistics page.

Our web site is a group effort, and due credit must be given to the webminister's stalwart helpers.

Brian Crick - graphics guru
Milesent Vibert - Data entry and second string webmistress
Calum - constant source of material
Pietro - tireless typer of minutes
Aiden and Celeste - keepers and presenters of backups
Donasian - proof-reading listserving and second string emergency backup webminister's assistant
Pietro, Aiden and Edward Brackenburye - providers of many coats of arms
David le Ymagour - many, many pictures

Technical Stuff

Lady Lyonnete's (The person who initially created and designed this webpage)So You Want to be a Webmistress? handout is available for the curious.

This web site was originally produced using Notepad, Adobe Illustrator (7.0) and Adobe Photoshop (4.0 and 5.0). I still use Notepad as my primary editor, though I've upped to Photoshop 6.0 for graphics. It is best viewed in Internet Explorer 4+ but looks just fine in Netscape 4.8 and above. (You might have noticed a slight misallignment betwixt the shield and the title of the page on the original site, this was due to Netscape's inability to understand a zero-width frame border. Lyonnete tried using tables instead of frames to get rid of this, but the look just wasn't appealing enough. If you have graphics suggestions, I welcome them!) The banner and sidebar graphics were designed with a 640x480 screen in mind, with tileable background graphics to fill out the largest screens available today.

The computer itself was an IBM 300GL (Pentium 1, 166mHz processor and 48 megs of ram) running Windows NT Workstation 4.0. On March 10, 2001 I switched it to a new shiney Dell 8100 (Pentium 4, 1.13gHz processor and 256 Megs of ram, ooooh much nicer) running Windows 2000 Professional and using Microsoft's Personal Web Server. (Hey, it was free).

Site History

The site first went up in the summer of 1998. It was hosted on Ionet, an ISP in Tulsa, Oklahoma. (Hey, it was free). In September of 1998 the site was moved to its present location, the web minister's computer. Our network connection is maintained by the generous graces of Case Western Reserve University's department of Information services.

On March 5, 1999, disaster struck the Cleftland's web site. A poorly- written uninstall program deleted the entire drive on which the site was hosted. The page was down for nearly five hours, and for several days afterward consisted of a mere shaddow of its former self. As of today, March 26, 1999, the page is still recovering, but is stronger than ever. Many thanks are due to Aiden and Celeste for providing backup copies of the lost data.

In May of 2000 we recieved the Sable Spider Design Award for Spring of AS XXXV. This is an SCA-wide award honoring SCA web pages for pleasing and easily understood design. Yay us!

In August of 2000 the poor, unsuspecting webpage was taken over by Lyonnete's evil twin, Milesent. She changed the hostname to Cleftlands just to confuse everyone (and to shorten the website's adress).

On March 10, 2001 I moved the website to a new computer with oodles and oodles more room on it and a exponentially faster processor. Running windows 2000, it has a better version of Microsoft Personal Web Server that I hope will provide noticeable better acess to the site. Unfortunately, the email mailing lists could not be served on the same computer any more (I couldn't find a free listserver program that would run on 2000, well, I found one but I hated it, so being the despot I am rejected it.) The mailing lists were moved to an Sun workstation running linux (Donasian administers it) called cleftlist.cwru.edu.

On August 2nd, 2001 I upgraded from Windows 2000 Professional to Windows 2000 Server, the website was down for just over two hours thanks to a long download of the security update needed to protect us from the Code Red Worm that's been going around. On the plus side, we now have unlimmited current connections! whee!

On November 14th, 2001 the new website's design was unveiled! Less friendly to older browsers, this asp driven site is nonetheless much easier to update and navigate and includes the webministry's dream of a completely searchable directory, oooooo. For those who miss the old site, or are just curious about what it used to look like, it's linked here.

Contribute!

A website is only as good as its content, so if you have anything at all you would like to see up here, pictures, anctidotes, links, whatever, email me! My hard drive has pleanty of space to host whatever you like. If you can't transfer files over email, I do have an FTP server set up on this machine. Email me for more detailed instructions.