M.G. Nuts dot com

The new, updated site went online yesterday at around 2:45 AM. During the next seven hours while I was passed out, there were 1,300 unique visitors! By that evening it was up to around 2,000! I’m glad so many people showed interest in my efforts with the site. It makes all the late night marathon coding sessions worth it! Some interesting statistics for the computer geeks (like me) in the crowd are:

• On launch day, there were 2,693 visitors.
• 42% of you are running Mozilla / Firefox browsers, and 40% Internet Explorer. 40% of those on IE are using version 6, which is the worst of the bunch from a webmaster’s point of view.
• 88% of visitors are on Windows-based operating systems, and 8% are on Apple products. 3% are techie enough to use Linux.
• Windows XP is the most popular, with 21.5% of users running it. Windows 7 is next most popular at 7% followed by Windows Vista, and then the combined various Apple products at 3%.
• Shockingly, some of you are still using Windows 95! Seriously, it’s time to upgrade. Other ancient operating systems that are surprisingly prevalent are Windows 98, ME, NT and 2000.
• But the worst is that in the past month there were 25 visits by Windows 3.1 systems. This is the electronic equivalent of a person traveling down the freeway with a horse and buggy!

Welcome to the new and (hopefully) improved M.G. Nuts web site! It has been a massive undertaking to update this site over the past couple years and there is still much to do in the way of housekeeping and content additions. As of now, there are 4,107 images and 174 pages on this site. So please, if you find errors, bugs, typos or any other problem with the site, no matter how small, let me know! Use the contact button in the menu to the left to send a note.

Now for those of you who doubted the new site would ever be finished, well…. I can’t say I blame you. I can’t believe it myself that this thing is finally for real! Hopefully no one was expecting anything that would blow their socks off because that wasn’t the idea behind this project. What I’ve done is modernized the look and function of the site, streamlined the navigation and added (as well as organized) a lot of content. Unfortunately this did require throwing out the old site and literally starting from scratch. If I knew how much work it would truly be and how long it would take to complete, I may have never started the project at all. Whoever said ignorance is bliss never re-wrote a web site! In the end, I believe result has been worth the effort. I hope you do too!

Well, the site was done and ready to go live. All I had to do was move some files and make a database edit to make sure everything would play nice together. This required doing something rather scary – backing up the database and wiping it from the server. Well, there’s a first time for everything and this was the first time the database refused to upload. There was an error somewhere and long story short, the site was gone. Two and a half years wiped from the face of the Earth. Every attempt to fix the problem led to more and bigger issues but in the end I have everything under control, thanks to redundant backups which I was able to use to patch up the offending bits of data. Whew! No, make that a double Whew!

So much for the deadline of May 7. Here it is, 30 minutes before May 8th and I have hours worth of work to do to get this fixed. Considering I’ve been awake now for 19 hours and that I’m running on maybe ten hours of sleep in the past two days, I don’t think I will get the site online tonight. It will be 3AM before I’m done with repairs and then I still have to start over with moving the site to its permanent home. The lesson learned today? Stick to old cars. They’re easier to deal with!

The countdown has begun! The site will go online this Saturday, May 7th. I’ve been cracking down all week, working into the wee hours of the night to get things sorted out and update as much content as possible. There are now 173 pages and over 4,000 photos contained on the site. Needless to say, this would be a seriously daunting task had I realized early on how far I would take the project. Lucky for me, I had little foresight in such matters so the work progressed seemingly under its own steam. I was merely the guy shoveling coal into the fire.

As always, fan contributions make up a large portion of this site so if you have anything you feel is of particular interest, especially historical photographs, please send them in! I may not get submissions added right away, and I’ll admit that I still have dozens that have been waiting for over a year or more, but I will get to them eventually… honest!

What most people don’t know is that I exist in a different state of time than the rest of the universe. Therefore when I said in the previous entry that I would try to get the site online within a month, what I meant was one month in Steve time. Work is progressing again and this time it looks like the site really will go live soon. Do you believe it this time?

I’m nowhere near finished but it’s just about to the point where I can live with it. Several sections will either be disabled or missing a lot of content, namely the Historical Gallery which will have only half of its intended content. All good things come in time I suppose. I just can’t say if it will be Steve time or “the rest of the universe” time.

Little work has been done to the site over the past few months, but I am now cracking down and making some progress (again). I’m hoping to go live with the new site this month but we’ve all heard that one before! There are still hundreds of images to be uploaded and lots of submitted content to sort through, as well as unfinished trip reports, etc. These may have to wait until after the site is up. For now I am working the final bugs out of key areas, including the gallery search function and image processing. The countdown has begun… or has it?

While progress crawls along at a snail’s pace, I have come to realize that I will never catch up with the incoming content, nor will I ever be satisfied that enough has been accomplished on the site to warrant putting it online.  That leaves only two options – put it online soon regardless of its condition or throw it away.  Since there is no way I’m abandoning so much work, I’ve decided to do some clean up work, add what I can of the more significant content and get this thing public.  Stay tuned…

With no room left in the garage or driveway, I find myself occasionally thinking of selling a car to simplify things around here.  Not having the courage to let anything go, I came up with a new plan… buy another one!  When your wife says she wants a 1939 Ford V8 Pickup and there happens to be one for sale nearby at a price you can’t refuse, there is only one course of action.  We took that course and dragged home a new project that will suck up yet more time I don’t have, and more driveway space that doesn’t exist.  Overall we’re thrilled with the new acquisition and early restoration work has been fun.  See photos, and follow the restoration process by clicking HERE.

Some time during January, we hit 100,000 unique visits to the site.  Who would have thunk that our little site would keep people coming back for so many years?  This event has given me renewed inspiration to get the site done but work is still very, very slow and there is a TON of content still waiting to be uploaded.  I will keep at it, but with the new year and the 100K mark come and gone, I no longer have a major goal to aim for so no promises!  Not like the previous two goals did me any good…

The site update started last October is still in progress. This is a huge project, requiring every page of the site to be written again from scratch, Progress is sporadic and slow, but it is progress nonetheless. Updates to the current site are still on hold. Stay tuned…