Re: More domain name confusion?

[<pl...@pi...>]

Clark Gaylord wrote:
> This was going to be just a quick note about our 
> "pre-production/production" web content design, but I started rummaging 
> around through the archives and thought I'd go ahead a document the 
> history for reference. Sorry for the lack of brevity. --ckg
> 
> The design for managing the web content is that the sourceforge site is 
> considered "pre-production" which then gets to the "production" 
> gnuplot.info site once/day. It was originally intended that the 
> sourceforge project would be the primary site for gnuplot *development* 
> (which I established 1 February 2000; HBB joined in April 2000). The 
> idea was that we could work with the web site effectively on a 
> "pre-prod" server (now this is sourceforge), which then is occasionally 
> in a state of flux, and automatically this will get rolled into 
> production once per day. There is a very small risk that the state of 
> flux would happen at the moment of sync, and this is obviously a pretty 
> cheesy design. However, it was a very easy way to give us a "poor man's 
> CMS", and the content has never had a "must be updated in fifteen 
> minutes because CNN is running a story that is going to give us $4M 
> RIGHT NOW!" nature. More importantly, the only thing we must do to 
> perform a major rewrite of the web site is to break the mirror while we 
> work on it (or if we wanted to have a real "development" web site 
> distinct from the public facing web site).
> 
> I think we may have had www.gnuplot.vt.edu canonical in February 1999 
> (ftp was started in 1998), prior to the gnuplot.org domain. I picked up 
> the content from Alex Woo in late 1998, and I think Lars ran the old 
> cmpc1 ftp server. That was about when we started having this 
> staging/production environment. I think Lars Hecking had the primary 
> content shortly after we set up the gnuplot.org domain, and he operated 
> until 2004 when we migrated web content to sourceforge. John Turner had 
> the gnuplot.org domain between 1998 and 2001, when we lost it and I 
> registered gnuplot.info, both of which have always been hosted at 
> Virginia Tech. gnuplot.info came on the air 3 Jan 2002. In 2000, I 
> created the sourceforge space to support gnuplot *development* (that's 
> why the project is named "gnuplot development") and give us a CVS home. 
> Mailing lists were migrated from Dartmouth to sourceforge in 2003. We 
> started using sourceforge as our pre-production web site in late 2004, 
> when Lars had to move off of his server at ucc.ie.
> 
> The suitability of the various options is arguable. Sourceforge tends to 
> have a more "high availability" server environment (we "think" ....) 
> Though there have certainly been plenty of issues with sourceforge over 
> the last decade, this is much more true of a single server that some guy 
> (i.e. me) takes care of (actually, the server has the support from a 
> "team" of sysadmins, currently at the Virginia Tech Transportation 
> Institute http://www.vtti.vt.edu/ ). VT is better connected to the 
> research and international communities due to its involvement in 
> Internet2 and National Lambda Rail, but this is from a strictly 
> "performance" perspective not necessarily based on path redundancy, etc. 
> So, from that perspective you could argue either way. It really is about 
> having the ability for developers to work on the site without having to 
> worry so much about breaking it temporarily.
> 
> Of course if we were to lose the VT hosting option someday I would not 
> mind using sourceforge if necessary, though I would probably first look 
> for something to replicate the existing design.
> 
> Anyway, I hope that explains why we have it set up this way and it makes 
> sense.
> 
> --ckg
> 

Perhaps due to longevity as a gnuplot site or general content across VT 
domain this mirror got a google PR of 7 the last time I looked.

I've rarely seen a PR that high.

That will have a strong bearing on the google results for any search 
relating to the content which could be a simple as someone looking for a 
plotting utility.

That argument alone would seem to be a good reason for keeping it (and 
getting the content sorted before the G notices all the content it has 
cached no longer exists, returns 404 and decided to dump the PR7).

Any site with a PR7 deserves respect .

greetz.