The entire project really didn't work out. I was under the impression that all it really needed was some good leadership, but after numerous attempts to get anything done, I found out that there weren't too many people who were both experienced in the areas we needed and active. At that point, I scaled back and decided to just get something online myself. Soon I was too busy to be active any longer and I decided to stop.
About a week ago I emailed Adam about not continuing calc.org. I had received an offer for the domain name and I forwarded that to Adam. It would be better for calc.org to be in the hands of another person in the niche or a similar niche than for it to be taken by the squatters. This is a note so that people know that calc.org in the future is not really related to the original calc.org.
As for the calc.org program archive, if someone wants to do something with it, let me know. There's some 3000 programs in there, many with screenshots. Some of the programs are ones never seen before (such as a very interesting on-calc C compiler for the TI-89). Some program descriptions are in the MySQL database, but many were lost when the database was cleared years ago. We extracted a lot of program descriptions and such from archive.org, so most descriptions are available. Reorganizing the programs would be a big task however and was my main obstacle in not getting something online myself. I won't joke about this. It really is an enormous task to reorganize the programs and integrate the two databases.
There also were a bunch of programming tutorials, many of which are dated, that were on the calc.org website at one point. If someone wants those, let me know too.
Thanks to everyone who helped. I apologize for being so busy as to not email everyone in the project about this. In fact, the only reason I even am posting this is because I was subscribed to the thread! I won't say that the work was wasted. It was a good lesson in project management for me and taught me one thing: getting work done is really what matters. A lot of good things did happen still, such as the program description extraction and the design work. It was just that what really mattered, a site-wide script to work the website, never was completed.
For some reason, after I disabled the domain from my hosting, the calc.org domain simply shows the main page of the main website of that hosting. So that's why it's displaying a Super Soaker website. It surely wasn't intentional.
I'm of the opinion that the site could have been saved. there was no reason to redesign the site as much as they were doing. I can understand that the calc.org engine was hard to handle primarily since it was designed from scratch to handle calc.org, but they could at least threw up a simple CMS/forum to keep it going for a little while until you could get the development up to speed, instead they let it whither until it was basically a ghost town.
ti-news.net appears to be going the same route as of late, Hopefully they won't lose the domain they currently have. I think this is their third one if I remember correctly.
I'd really like to know how calc.org handled their site hosting. It would be nice to try and revive that part of the domain, since so many people took advantage of that offer, but I'm no Web designer and I don't have huge server resources to do what would be necessary to bring calc.org back from the dead. I definetly wouldn't have kept the domain parked on that joke of a host for as long as they did. they're still paying for that in spam, joe-jobs and the like, which makes it even hardrer to revive.
At least the Archives are going to UTI I guess, although Archives in this day and age are pretty much ticalc.org, and it might as well stay that way. At least their giving the tutorials to you from what I hear, so at least they'll be back on line which is always a good thing.
I'd send you the Michael Van Der Kolk Tutorials that were on his site that I have archived, but they're not mine, and I have a good feeling that it would be hard to get permission from him.
There seems to be lots of TI sites that are slowly dying (like TI-News). People don't have the time or energy to keep updating the site, so they just let it go. You can say that it's sad, that it's a reflection on the larger TI community itself, but I just think that's part of life. People move on to other things.
There seems to be lots of TI sites that are slowly dying (like TI-News). People don't have the time or energy to keep updating the site, so they just let it go. You can say that it's sad, that it's a reflection on the larger TI community itself, but I just think that's part of life. People move on to other things.
I've said for a long time that from getting interested into programming calculators to getting away from the community is roughly 3-5 years. It's a miracle that ticalc.org survived as long as it did, but that shows you the dedication there. Just about everyone else is gone now. In fact, I would have to say that this is possibly the 5th generation of Ti community menbers I've seen
Me and Hiryu are definitely not the norm in the Ti community. We've been at this for over 10 years now. My site will have it's 10 year annerversity april 4th of next year. You can most likely count the amount of community members above 7 years on two hands, and most of them are working for ticalc.org.
as for ti-news net? they should just run the thing like slashdot or digg, or at least make the conglomerate feed the main site or just get a ton of editors from trustworthy users and let them submit until the cows come home. 28-Aug-07 is the date on their registrar. they just better make sure that This doesn't happen again.
And I was thinking, if that tutorial was originally on calc.org anyways, then I could post it, since I will be posting the tutorials in a group, per say, like the way I have it now is by author, I will just have a folder for calc.org tutorials...
And I would LOVE to get my hands on some decent 89/92 tutorials. BASIC for them is hard compared to the 83+... :S
I don't think it was on calc.org. maybe he posted it there, but I don't know. It's also not a tutorial per se as much as it is an optimization guide. I believe there was a couple of 92 tutorials on calc.org that gave you basic coding, but not much else.
89-92 basic is actually a lot easier than 83 basic in the long run. it's just a different syntax. there's a lot of different commands that are very powerful, particularly indirection. The book index will be your best friend in that regard. Of course I started out with a 92, and the keyboard is literally a dream when it comes to programming on calc. If you got the Ti-keyboard that works as well.
I think I'Ll try to contact TI news admin, to know if he still wants to run it, if not I'll ask him if i can host it myself and if he can transfer me the domain name so I can rebuy it before it expires. I will probably not maintain it since i have no website design knowledge but at least it will be still be avaliable if jake plan to shut it down.
Imho if it was me the conglomerate news should be on TI news front page, as it is the main purpose of the site
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