SurvivalRing has been on the web since 1997. It started out as a single web page to support the SurvivalRing Survival and Preparedness webring, hosted way back then on Webring.org (now a poorly run Dot.Com company). Within a couple of months, the webring had 12 members webrings. By the late fall of 1999 (pre Y2K), SurvivalRing had 750 members and amazing traffic.

Starting in early 1998, SurvivalRing become it’s own website, with hosting, downloads, features, and a budding online community was born.

Today, SurvivalRing has been beefed up on infrastructure and backend support, and now has the room, and power, to offer AMAZING future growth.

Here’s the details…

Current online storage capacity….
25 gigabytes (or 25,0000 megabytes)
(originally? 10 megabytes)

Current bandwith limits…
None - Now with Freedom bandwith
(originally? 500 megabytes a month)

Current UNIQUE domain capability…
8 unique, full blown domain baseds websites
(originally? 1…and multiple subdomains)

added…
SSL certificate and security features
unlimited email addresses
unlimited subdomains
much, much more…

Now, what can I do with all that space?

=> Put dozens of CDs worth of new content on the web.

=> Put ISO CD image files on the web for folks to instantly download, if they prefer that do receiving a regular CD in the mail, for both of my CD publications to date

=> Put HUNDREDS of new files online that I’ve been holding off on to keep the site running smoothly without hitting bandwidth or space limitations. The new documents will contain tens of thousands of new pages, never before on the web.

=> Add video productions as I make them, and keep all variations of video files (mpeg, mov, rm, avi, etc) online for visitor choices of download

=> upcoming podcast production…ALL shows will remain online instead of being rotated offline.

Who knows what else I’ll add? But, the good news is, I literally have power and space to put incredible amounts of data, info, and knowledge online, all in one place.

Now, I’ve gone through as many parts of the website since the move was completed today, and think I’ve fixed all the database errors that popped up. If, however, you find any part of the website now working, please email me and let me know so I can fix it asap.

Now, go and enjoy the rest of the website. And, thanks for dropping in…

Rich
Founder-SurvivalRing.org

I’m finishing up an Associates of Applied Science degree in Web Design in a few weeks, and I’m working on my “big project” for this semester…conversion of SurvivalRing.org to a database driven website, from static html pages. It’s going to be a biggie, but I’m at the point of total understanding of how and what to do.

Very happy to be at this point, too. This is the reason I came back to college as a non-traditional student…to learn the skills to enhance a project that has taken over my life, and make it the cutting edge resource that I know it can be.

At the same time I’ve been working on this degree, and the A.A.S in Electronic Media that I earned last year, I’ve also been playing with a lot of other web technology.

Using Dreamweaver and Flash, I’ve done some pretty cool things, and I’m very comfortable with what these tools can do. I’ve come to enjoy a handful of tools that make web development much faster and easier. For example, I have a full blown web server running on my laptop right now, using Wampserver. This package is free, includes mysql, php, apache, and phpmyadmin. Perl, Zend Optimizer, and Webalizer are also available as downloads for this wonderful tool. I’m using this system to work on many projects right now, before taking them to my online hosting account. Development time has been greatly increased.

I’ve also been hearing a lot about Ruby on Rails, and found a similar package for creating an environment on the laptop for learning Ruby. It’s called Instant Rails, and creates a running server environment for Ruby. I haven’t done anything with Ruby yet, but it looks like an immensely likable package. Once I’ve played with it a bit, I’ll share some fun stuff I do with it.

I’m sure I’ve stated it before, but I’ll say it again. I’m not getting these degrees and skills to just be hireable by other companies. I’m putting enormous amounts of time into creating cutting edge web tools, infrastructure, and state of the art programming, to enable much easier, greatly enhanced, and much faster serving of the same science and fact based survival and preparedness information I’ve been doing for almost ten years now.

Sure, I’ll love a good paying, benefit enhanced, and long term job to make my life easier, supporting my wife and I, in some comfort and ease (compared to the path we’ve had for the past 20 years of hard work due to no college degrees).

The Entreprenuerial bug has bitten, and I’ve got a business plan, along with marketing and publicity plans, to make my little SurvivalRing website THE survival and preparedness site for the ages…or at least enough to help folks worldwide, while making a real living from it. Time will tell…but I know enough now that I can make it happen.

Time to head back to the editing screen to do some more code hacking…Enjoy the sites!