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Almost every day we are adding new items. In order to help you find the newest additions we have added this page. Here we will try to log changes and additions by date as we make them. There will always be daily changes in the Virtual Hammer-In and the Guru page.
That is over ONE MILLION per year (353 days). Our curent traffic rate is 1.67 million/year and will exceed 2 million/year sometime next year! This is following the same increase that has had us equaling the total accumulated traffic of the prior years! January 1, 2003 @ 2,255,000 Year Start. June 30, 2003 @ 3,000,000 We have broken the three million visitor mark this morning. Traffic is down a little. That is 745,000 visits since January 1st for an average of 4082 visits a day. June 30, 2003 @ 3,000,000 We have broken the three million visitor mark this morning. Traffic is down a little. That is 745,000 visits since January 1st for an average of 4082 visits a day. July 8, 2003 @ 3,028,964 Posted an early book review of the NEW Mousehole Forge by Richard Postman. Moving Pains - We are moving to new (slightly different) server. Soon you will see all kinds of things broken here. Should have them sorted out by mid August! Don't send notes about errors until WE think it is straightened out. Then we will ask for input. July 13, 2003 @ 3,045,041 Posted Book 3 chapter 3 of Paw-paw's Revolutionary Blacksmith. Also posted a new FAQ on Vises. Still in the process of moving. . . :( July 14, 2003 @ 3,047,528 We now have 165 CSI members not including the 5 "gurus". July 17, 2003 @ 3,062,662 Posted an iForge flypress demo PREVIEW on Wednesday. You can see it on the iForge classroom Auction: I setup the Auction system on the new server last night. It is going to work OK. Please do not register on the CURRENT system. We have backed up the database and will copy it to the new system in a few days (or as soon as I figure out how. . ). July 22, 2003 @ 3,075,793 SERVER MOVE! We are very close. Some things will be working but others NOT. The deadline is the end of the month no matter what. ABANA-Chapters/Affilates If we host your site it has been moved to the NEW server and will be operational. Those groups that did not take us up on free/sponsored hosting will be removed from the index. If you are still interested in hosting it is still available but our template and database sites are being removed. SERVICES we expect to be broken for a short while as we move:
July 23, 2003 @ 3,082,228 MOVING PAINS We have broken many of the ABANA-Chapter pages and two client's pages. Everything is screwed up today. . . Those with their own URLs and those that replaced the database driving content are working. But the others are not. We DID manage to get the hit counters working AND transfer all the hit counter data (including that from the ABANA-Chapter pages). That doesn't sound like much but there are there are 1,315 counters spead across 75 web sites. . . Tomarrow is another day. July 28, 2003 : TRANSFERED TO NEW SERVER It took 30 days to setup and move to the new server. This included numberous other sites that we host. July 29, 2003 @ 3,100,500 / 52,806 MOVING PAINS PROGRESS & ERROR REPORT: The old anvilfire.com and abana-chapter.com server is now dead and gone as of 10:00 pm EST. Or at least my access to it. Surprisingly a few things are running there but other things are not. The Sysop there has 5 years of clean up to do. August 1, 2003 @ 3,107,834 MOVING PAINS PROGRESS & ERROR REPORT: Web Ring Server: It was not until the old anvilfire server was off-line that we realized how many links were going to the old ring server. Six months ago we had setup anvilfire.NET and advised all the ring members to point their links to the .NET address rather than the .COM. Many did not which was not unexpected. But we were just as bad and had dozens of bad links on our own pages. . . I spent most of yesterday with our server host trying to get the old Rings address pointed to the new rings address. There is something screwed up in our server configuration (that I did) that the server folks couldn't figure out. Connections looking for RINGS.anvilfire.com kept going to WWW.anvilfire.com. . .?? I made trial and error changes all day with no results. Meanwhile the errors kept mounting. . . This morning at 8:00 I came up with a temporary solution. I've mirrored the critical ring scripts on the anvilfire address. This will prevent broken member pages ont the web ring for the time being. SERVER ERRORS Sorting out missing files and broken links from the move is a daily task. Some files just didn't make it and others were not in the copy on my local machine. But what makes it really difficult to sort through are bad out side links and hackers. Hackers are constantly testing every server on the Internet (and that includes all new WinXP machines on a cable connection). They use robotic programs that test every address looking for things like: /cgi-bin/siteadmin.plThe first is looking for a site management program that can probably be hacked and let anyone change your web site. The second two are testing every server (over and over) for WinIIs exploits to break into the server (never use a windows server. . . Oh, you have Xp. . .?). The last is looking for a common form submission program that if it is an old copy the hacker can use it to send SPAM. Yes, SPAMMERs steal mail services any time they can. THE POINT? Searching for real errors generated by the site on the server is a chore compounded by constant hack attacks. Security Suggestion: If you run common programs like FormMail on your system be sure to have the latest secure version of the program. THEN rename it something else. The scanning hacks are not focusing on a specific server they are looking for easy hacks on a global scale. Are you an easy hack? August 2, 2003 @ 3,111,171 STORE: We are having trouble with the store not sending recipts. The CC system responds but the store doesn't send a copy of the order. The orders ARE being recieved and recorded fine. The mail is just not going out. . . Member System: If you are having trouble try clearing your bookmark and creating a new one. It should go to www.anvilfire.com/members/ and nothing more specific. August 9, 2003 @ 3,133,000 (Pub 200,500), not so wee hours THE PUB IS BACK! We had considerable debugging and digging out source code to get the pub running once again! Thank Kiwi (Andrew Hooper) our Sysop from New Zealand for getting us back on-line! STORE: Is back working correctly now. CSI Member System: We finaly have an all banner-free system for our CSI members. There is still a little debugging to do but it all works pretty well for the most part. If you are having trouble loging in go to www.anvilfire.com/members/ and nothing more specific. If that does not work, clear your cache and try again. We have had numerous folks complain about lack of new articles over the past few months. This has been largely due to the hundreds of hours our server move has absorbed (3 people and well over 500 hours). HOWEVER, we have posted dozens of new articles since the beginning of the year. A few:
August 9, 2003 @ 3,133,693 The Pub has only been back on-line for 9 hours and it has had visitors from (in order of number): USA, New Zealand, US Educational, Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, Switzerland, US Military, US Government, Croatia (Hrvatska), Mexico, Non-Profit Organization, Netherlands, Thailand, Argentina, India, Finland, South Africa, Italy, Brazil, Singapore, Belgium, Spain, France, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Germany. August 9, 2003 @ 3,141,006 The Slack-Tub Pub is fully back on line and misc. bugs fixed. The Pub log rotation is setup to change at 4:30 AM EST which is close to the lowest usage time on the pub. As the stats develop we will adjust it to the absolute slowest time of day. That looks like it may be closer to an hour later than what we have. We are slowly tracking down "404 file not found" errors and correcting the bad links. If you have trouble with a page not displaying the drop down menu or other parts of anvilfire try clearing your cache and returning to the same page. If it is still a problem please report it to us. We now have 250 pages of archived guru and hammer-in pages. August 11, 2003 @ 3,143,255 Posted two Flypress articles on the iForge page. These are first postings and the rest will come soon. August 12, 2003 @ 3,143,509 Posted the Russell O'Dell portion of the Flypresses demo and corrected spelling. August 12, 2003 @ 3,146,222 (midnight) Rewrote the Flypress Tooling article. It has been simplified and now has links to 10 seperate pages on each tool. These pages are designed to be printable and have more detail images. The flypress demo now consists of 13 pages and there is more to come. I am working on adding navigation menues to the individual pages. August 13, 2003 @ 3,147,773 Reogranized the flypress demo's (the 100+ images were getting out of hand), added counters and drop down menus on the individual detail pages. More to come! August 20, 2003 @ 3,174,642 Posted the fourth part of the press and tooling demos. The Commercial Tooling demo has 5 pages and over 45 images. Also updated the flypress tooling article with a punch holder. August 21, 2003 @ 3,175,929 Added THIS (what's NEW) to the drop down menu. Not sure I like the way it works on the public pages. . . Archived the guru page (a weekly task). August 27, 2003 @ 3,198,203 Added several new images to our home page random image display. Several are courtesy of Gill Fahrenwald from his Blacksmith Calendars. September 1, 2003 @ 3,215,230 Added FlyPresses.com to the fly presses iForge demos. Our counters say we had 107,396 visits in August. That is an average of 3464 visitors per day. Webalizer says we had 94,239 visits (??) but 4,247,121 "hits". However the pub is on a seperate report as are several other parts of anvilfire. I think our counters are accurate. We served 3,136,865 files We were linked to or refered to by 9484 sites. We were accesed from 118 countries. The pub has regular users from 30 different countries. Note the huge difference between visits and "hits". Many unscrupulous sites selling advertising or services will report hits instead of visits. If we were using hits we could claim to be a four million hit per month site! September 2, 2003 @ 3,217,391 Posted three archives, two weeks of the guru's den and the Hammer-In for August. September 2, 2003 @ 3,220,010 Posted a new gas forges FAQ on the FAQ page. Fixed the missing menu in the members FAQ page. September 3, 2003 @ 3,222,800 The server process that was causing the Pub, Pub watch, banners and downloads of pages to glitch once an hour on the hour has been changed to once a day during the wee hours. Still looking for the 6am glitch. . . moving to a new server has been no fun. Also fixed a glitch in the Members drop down menu. September 4, 2003 @ 3,225,376 We have a new advertiser, the Blacksmiths Journal. Updated the Pub Ticker. September 6 - 7, 2003 @ 3,235,000 We are finally getting our ABANA-Chapter page in order. The banner system is working again and I am fixing bad links and broken pages. If your group's page is missing or broke let me know. We are droping some that were not maintained. If you can find a webmaster for your group we will reinstate the site. Here we are over two months into our server move and we are still setting up. There has been some severe network lag this weekend for some reason. Often I could not access pages at all before they timed out. The problem was not our server but the Internet in the North East US. September 10, 2003 @ 3,249,200 Posted a new iForge demo and archived the guru's page. September 13, 2003 @ 3,258,500 We have passed the million visit mark for the year! Launched an ALL NEW PAGE! Calendar of Blacksmithing Events. Find out what events are coming up. List your group's event! We have another new advertiser, BigBLUhammer.com. September 24, 2003 @ 3,303,091 Added a new feature to the Calendar of Blacksmithing Events.. A monthly section for groups that have regularly scheduled meetings at the same place each month. Also added sections for annual and semi-annual events to be informational. We have TWO new gurus, Robert "Quenchcrack" Nichols and Thomas Powers. I've archived the guru's page before traveling to SOFA. I also fixed some link problems in some of the early editions of the news. October 1, 2003 @ 3,330,600 We have launched the 31st Edition of the anvilfire NEWS covering SOFA's Quad State Roundup. Seven pages are posted and more are on the way. October 3, 2003 @ 3,341,148 Archived all three forums, guru's page, V-Hammer-In, members. October 4, 2003 @ 3,344,839 See the Medieval Chest on Oldlocks.com. October 5, 2003 @ 3,350,000 wee hours Did our first semi-annual pub mailing in over a year. No sooner than I had finished and we had 115 bounce mails! These will be coming in for days and THEN I have to clean up the pub database. . . :( November 11, 2003 @ 3,510,000 You know things have been busy when I have not updated this page in over a month!
November 25, 2003 @ 3,568,450 Posted a George Dixon on Flypress demo on the iForge page. NOTE: 60 people had seen the demo before the final proofed version was posted and George has yet to comment on it. Besides traveling 300 miles to Asheville (with an overnight stay) to photograph this demo it took three days to setup and edit. December 8, 2003 @ 3,624,206 Posted a review of two small foundry books by Steve Chastain. Made the review of Richard Postman's NEW Mousehole Forge more visible. Finally posted the illustrations for chapter 4 of Paw-Paws Revolutionary Blacksmith. Chapter 5 is on the way. We have Richard Postman's Mousehole Forge and Gill Fahrenwald's 2004 blacksmith calendar available bundled together. They are bundled because the pricing on both was such that we could not sell them individualy. December 19, 2003 @ 3,678,277 Posted a page of quotes from the Bible referencing blacksmiths on the story page. Corrected the story page index. Added Semi-Steel to the glossary. December 23, 2003 @ 3,694,055 Posted a Junkyard steel FAQ on the FAQ's page. Linked it to/from several others December 24, 2003 @ 3,698,364 : 11:40 pm EST Posted Chapter five of book three of Paw-Paw's Revolutionary Blacksmith. Its one of the most poignient yet. Merry Christmas! December 25, 2003 @ 3,699,455 Caught up on guru page and Hammer-In archives. Updated the Junkyard steel FAQ December 30, 2003 @ 3,723,500 Added illustrations and a full bibliography to Bruce "Atli" Blackistone's Swords of Iron, Swords of Steel article on the Armoury page. Also linked to it from our un-released/in progress "Sword Making for Dummies" article. December 31, 2003 @ 3,725,200 YEAR END 125,765 visits in December |
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