Original System Notes

How holyarmy.org moved from flat files to MySQL, and why so many recovered records share one suspicious timestamp.

From the archivesWriting from an earlier age of the Internet, recovered from holyarmy.org.

Editor's note, 2026: The post referenced an earlier entry that was not recovered. The broken link has been removed.

I originally wrote this website software to run on a crappy HP-UX box that only had PHP ver. 3.0.8 or something. It was horribly outdated for its time even. That was September 25, 2001. Nearly 2 years ago. Anyway… I started first by trying to implement the database with DBM. DBM sucks. I didn’t try that for long at all. After that I decided to just use flat text files with custom delimiters and a small API for accessing and updating the data in those files. That’s probably why I didn’t spend a lot of time writing admin pages at the time; the parsing of all that text got ugly fast.

The transition to an SQL (mysql) database came on Feb 4, 2002. (see that day’s post). Finally, the data was managable. Since, then, well, I’ve not done TOO much until recently. I’m just writing this into the system log so I’ll remember some stuff. Oh, and if you notice lots of dates and times of Feb 4, 2002, 23:48:38, that’s when I moved all the original data. I changed the date of the original news postings but not the time, and I didn’t bother to change the date on most of the quotes (because I didn’t previously store quote dates).