This Site is Migrating to a New Platform
I've been toying with the idea of moving the content of this site to a new platform. Why, you may ask?
Over the years, the code behind this site has become more and more outdated, and is beginning to struggle to keep up with the amount of content contained therein. If you don't know, the site is written in classic ASP, backed by a MySQL database. I've done at least three major refactors of the code, mainly in the interest of improving performance and security. Alas, I think I've come to the end of the optimizations that I can perform with such an antiquated platform. There are simply too many hoops to jump through to keep the site running in a secure and performant manner.
As of this writing, these are the stats:
- 11248 knowledgebase posts
- 8200 Ophion time tracking entries
- 7012 File attachments
- 3102 Comments
- 1200+ Users
- 900+ Private messages
- There is also an analytics engine that I built in order to keep your data "in-house". I do still use Google and Bing analytics, mainly in order to watch how those search engines see the site, though. That set of tables for analytics contains a couple million rows.
I've also built a set of scripts I call Gatekeeper. This suite of scripts basically watches site interactions for potential security problems. It's looking for things like:
- Brute force attacks
- SQL Injection attacks
- Spam attempts
- PHP attempts
There are other things it looks for as well, but those are the highlights. The tables that back those functions roughly 100,000 rows. What could that data be? Banned IP addresses, bots, and even "bad neighborhoods". I find it especially funny that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of attempts each day by script kiddies and random bots to access .php pages like wp_admin.php and others on this site. As I mentioned, this site is written in classic ASP, and does not use PHP anywhere. Well, except for the traps. Script kiddies that access those pages get insta-banned and reported to AbuseIPDB.
Anyway, as you can see by the above facts and figures, there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes with each page you access on the site. Maintaining such a large set of data with classic ASP gets a little, umm, fun.
So, after much thinking and scheming, I'm leaning towards moving at least the knowledgebase portion off to another platform, most likely with a new domain name to go along with it. Don't fret, though! All content that is moved will be forwarded automatically to the new space, so you can easily find the information you're looking for. Although, you should probably update your links!
I'll probably leave the tools here on fortypoundhead.com for a bit, until I can migrate them gracefully. So basically everything on the Tools page and under My Stuff (for registered users) will stay here for a bit.
On a side note, not all of the content is going to make it. I'm going to skip the migration of "near-miss" content, and I'm sure I'll find some irrelevant stuff from the early days. I'll probably skip the PlanetSourceCode stuff as well, since it's all been replicated to GitHub for your viewing pleasure.
What you should expect to see
Content will start "disappearing from this site, and start appearing on fphkb.com. If you have an old link, you'll be automatically redirected to the new location. I do highly recommend that you update your links though, as I won't be keeping that redirector up forever.
Sorry for the ruckus. As I slow down with age, I am trying to keep these resources alive for those who come behind me. Be patient, and as always, hit me up with any questions, comments, or suggestions you might have. You can get me through the contact link in the footer, or webmaster@fortypoundhead.com.
Over the years, the code behind this site has become more and more outdated, and is beginning to struggle to keep up with the amount of content contained therein. If you don't know, the site is written in classic ASP, backed by a MySQL database. I've done at least three major refactors of the code, mainly in the interest of improving performance and security. Alas, I think I've come to the end of the optimizations that I can perform with such an antiquated platform. There are simply too many hoops to jump through to keep the site running in a secure and performant manner.
As of this writing, these are the stats:
- 11248 knowledgebase posts
- 8200 Ophion time tracking entries
- 7012 File attachments
- 3102 Comments
- 1200+ Users
- 900+ Private messages
- There is also an analytics engine that I built in order to keep your data "in-house". I do still use Google and Bing analytics, mainly in order to watch how those search engines see the site, though. That set of tables for analytics contains a couple million rows.
I've also built a set of scripts I call Gatekeeper. This suite of scripts basically watches site interactions for potential security problems. It's looking for things like:
- Brute force attacks
- SQL Injection attacks
- Spam attempts
- PHP attempts
There are other things it looks for as well, but those are the highlights. The tables that back those functions roughly 100,000 rows. What could that data be? Banned IP addresses, bots, and even "bad neighborhoods". I find it especially funny that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of attempts each day by script kiddies and random bots to access .php pages like wp_admin.php and others on this site. As I mentioned, this site is written in classic ASP, and does not use PHP anywhere. Well, except for the traps. Script kiddies that access those pages get insta-banned and reported to AbuseIPDB.
Anyway, as you can see by the above facts and figures, there are a lot of things going on behind the scenes with each page you access on the site. Maintaining such a large set of data with classic ASP gets a little, umm, fun.
So, after much thinking and scheming, I'm leaning towards moving at least the knowledgebase portion off to another platform, most likely with a new domain name to go along with it. Don't fret, though! All content that is moved will be forwarded automatically to the new space, so you can easily find the information you're looking for.
I'll probably leave the tools here on fortypoundhead.com for a bit, until I can migrate them gracefully. So basically everything on the Tools page and under My Stuff (for registered users) will stay here for a bit.
On a side note, not all of the content is going to make it. I'm going to skip the migration of "near-miss" content, and I'm sure I'll find some irrelevant stuff from the early days. I'll probably skip the PlanetSourceCode stuff as well, since it's all been replicated to GitHub for your viewing pleasure.
What you should expect to see
Content will start "disappearing from this site, and start appearing on fphkb.com. If you have an old link, you'll be automatically redirected to the new location. I do highly recommend that you update your links though, as I won't be keeping that redirector up forever.
Sorry for the ruckus. As I slow down with age, I am trying to keep these resources alive for those who come behind me. Be patient, and as always, hit me up with any questions, comments, or suggestions you might have. You can get me through the contact link in the footer, or webmaster@fortypoundhead.com.
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