Finally got the last finishing touches on the latest project. I alluded to the project in the post “Do You Have Control of Your Web Site?”. This new site was one of those sites that was ‘orphaned’ (to use a kinder word than ‘abandoned by the hosting provider’). There was a limited backup of parts of the database, but I had to do lots of manhandling of the database to get it into the proper format.

The site is a memorial to suicide victims, called “Suicide Memorial Wall“. It’s a place where the families and friends of suicide victims can post names on a memorial wall. As you three long-time readers know, our son Jason took his life after suffering from manic-depression for about 10 years. Since that time, we (mostly Pam) have been involved in various on-line support groups.

This site, along with several others, which you will find on the “Outreach” page of the Suicide Memorial Wall, was originally hosted on the OneManHostingCompany (OMHC) servers, which have had some issues with reliability and availability. So the owner of the site decided it was time to move the sites (content and databases) to a new hosting company (we chose BlueHost, since I’ve had good luck with them for several other sites I help manage).

The problem was that I couldn’t get FTP access (or access to the databases) from the OMHC folks, despite numerous email requests (that were mostly routinely ignored). That required a convuluted process of ‘scraping’ the sites (when they were available) to get some of the source code. But the databases were unavailable.

So I have spent at least 150 hours rebuilding several of the sites that used to be on OMHC. And I finally got the Suicide Memorial Wall done, along with the support forum site for the families and friends of suicide (Suicide Grief at http://www.suicidegrief.com/), and the Parents of Suicide-Friends and Family of Suicide at http://www.pos-ffos.com/ )  These two sites, among others, are a significant source of support of people who have been touched by suicide.

If you are so affected, or know of others that are affected by suicide, I urge you to visit those sites. They will be an immense help. I am pleased that I could help the groups and members by rebuilding the sites. But it would have been a lot easier with better support from the OMHC.