Something is up the ARarchive site

[heidegger]

This time it wasn't hackery that caused the outage. I had to update PHP on the server and that caused the Archive software to fail (I don't know which obsolete or removed feature was causing it). When I installed an older version of PHP for the archive's hosting, everything came back up. I'm afraid the day when I can't do that securely is coming.

I am writing my own platform for hosting the Archive because it is the kind of thing I do for a living (custom content management and commerce systems) and none of the existing open source or paid solutions do all of the things I want the Archive to do.

Essentially, I want the Archive front page to show the latest updates to any area of the Archive (stories, images, discussions) which it pretty much does now. I do want to improve the presentation (especially of stories) and make the site mobile friendly because it is not that right now. The deeper change will be to allow people to access content by who uploaded or created it (kind of like deviant art) - this will benefit content creators as well because they can see and manage their content from one place rather than by each type. For images, I want to set it up so that sequences can be uploaded and appear in order - most image galleries are not friendly to that approach. With custom software, I will be able to improve each section as people use it and find issues or new needs. I am really looking forward to the day when the Archive is on the new platform and firing on all cylinders.