The Def Guide to Zzap!64

My current hosting for the site (and many of the magazine scans) was getting too expensive, especially with the current exchange rate for the Euro->Dollar so I was planning to change hosting but 2 weeks before the hosting was up, Powweb decided to try and bill my stored card anyway, thankfully it was an out of date one so the charge didn't go through, but anyway... I had to get onto support to cancel the now "overdue" amount and put the site on hold next week.

This morning however, I got an email about a $0 charge and the site currently parked, so it's gone at the moment.

Just as well I made sure I had everything downloaded yesterday before contacting them!

I haven't done any work really on the site in years, it only gets about 18 home page views a day and does take up a lot of space (especially with Mort's recent 15GB uploads!!) so I don't want to spend much money on hosting it at all.

However, I have found some hosting for about €60 a year, which should do the trick so I might go with that, but either way things will be down for a day or two I would imagine before domains are switched over etc.

Gamebox64 is written in Perl and using the CGI module (which is a rather old module for web type things like getting in queries and printing html, it's what I used back in 1999 when first using Perl).

It seems the CGI module isn't included by default in Perl 5 now and thus I can't get the scripts running easily on my new hosting.

There seems to be ways around it by installing the module locally etc. but I think at this stage I might as well just rewrite the site in PHP, there's not too many pages and it shouldn't be doing anything too complicated.

So it'll take me a little while to do that no GameBox64.com for a few days

Well it certainly has taken more than a few days. I hadn't done anything with it for about the past year or two but last night I figured out where I was with the conversion and started working on it again.

The front page is nearly done and there's not too much code on the others so I'll give myself until the end of the month to get it done.

The code and JavaScript isn't the best but rather than trying to update all of that at the same time, I decided to just do the Perl -> PHP conversion and worry about the other parts later. The search suggestions / type ahead are actually done with bare JavaScript. No fancy JQuery back when I wrote that!

Still working on it. The front page is now working again, although nothing to see public yet. That was the page with the most code on it AFAIK so probably not much more to do.

Converted the AJAX search and fixed some things on the front page.

I accidentally clicked on a PERL page on the site a few days ago and apart from the DB connection part, it actually seemed to work....

So maybe the host now does support the Perl library I was using or something else changed...

Oh well. It's almost converted to PHP now anyway, so I'm continuing.

When I have it converted to PHP and gone live. I am then planning to convert to Ruby on Rails and have a play with hosting it on AWS.

I need to get some experience with AWS and this seems like a good project to do it with. Lots of options though, but I think EC and DB on EBS might work for RoR for the lowest cost option (when the free tier year ends).

Another page done now. Only one more to go I believe....

Then I think it's on to cleaning up the HTML and CSS to make it tidier etc.

Last page done! I think that's actually about it, just a bit more testing and fixing a couple of smaller things and it'll be ready to go live again.