Pond Boss Forums INTRO Questions & Observations Pond Boss business

Everyone...several items of Pond Boss business for you to know.
1) The princess Debbie and I just returned from the Texas Outdoor Writer's Association conference. Pond Boss received a first place award for Best Magazine with less than 25,000 subscribers. The website garnered a 2nd place award, and the story about Richmond Mill Lake took a third (out of appx 50 entries).
2) The website has exceeded its storage space and bandwidth, so we will soon be making some changes. I don't expect the site to go down. We will probably changes hosts. That's a $500 fee and increase in monthly charges. This means we will need to sell some banner advertising soon.
3) The above fact also means we will soon begin deleting selected posts, probably starting from 2002 and moving forward. We will eliminate posts which don't apply to ponds, pond management, pondmeistering, etc. So, if you want to retrieve and store old posts, you best do it.
4) We will have a meeting (I hope this week) with our webmaster, JP Greeson, to take care of this business, and start a "beginner's" section of applicable posts and FAQ's.
5) A number of you didn't get your Jan/Feb Pond Boss on time. There was a mailing problem. We submit an electronic list to the mailhouse in PA each issue. They print addresses on each magazine and mail them for us. Last issue, the last 288 names were omitted because of a gap in the list. It's easy to blame a computer glitch, but that's what happened, and we didn't catch it until people told us they hadn't received the magazine.
6) The March/April is printed and should be headed to the mailhouse soon. I'll let you know when it goes. This issue is outstanding. It's a must read for anyone interested in pond management. We went from 56 to 64 pages this issue. We also have several new advertisers.
7) Kudos to Trent Lewis. He is our newest advertiser. He personally told me that participation on the website should be accompanied by an ad. He's putting his money where his mouth is. Go Trent.
8) Along those same lines, we welcome Greg Grimes back as a paid advertiser. Greg has also referred another advertiser to Pond Boss. Thanks to Greg.
9) After a few emails back and forth, Todd Overton will advertise in Pond Boss, beginning in the May/June issue. Todd advertised once before, back in 2001. Glad Todd is coming aboard with an ad.

Dear Pond Boss website addicts...that's it for now and thanks for being with us. You all are the best. I should have some time tonight or tomorrow to post some thoughts on a few of the recent questions to the site.

Lusk

Bob and "ALL" that make PondBoss happen. Just continue to let us know what it will take to keep this high quality site and magazine growing, Ted

PS And "CONGRATS"

I think it's Win/Win for the magazine and the advertisers. I've already spent money with the advertisers, and will continue to do so throughout the years. Good job, everybody!

...a membership fee to cover costs wouldn't bother me a bit. (No, Theo...my fee should not be $500!)

How about $500 and a monthly fee?

Bob :

Will there be a way for us to know which threads will be deleted before they are history so we can decide on copying. The reason I ask is I would hate to wake up and realize we had lost, for example, the Pirates post or the PB funnies post ( which by link covers many great stories) or the Christmas post ( I know these are in 05 but some of the links or other posts may be in 02).

I am thinking of giving a couple of gift subscriptions to the magazine.
As cheap as storage space is on computers, I am surprised they would not offer more space for free. I have 80 GB free on my second hard drive. Is there a way to download the entire Ask the Boss file?

Maybe Brettski has a good idea. A premium pay membership would be good, with some access to older magazine articles online. I would like that. That way we would not discourage new free membership or limit access to ask the boss.

Other than print, I don't know how to retrieve and store old posts. Without a data dictionary and pointers, I expect it would be pretty unwieldy.

Just how big is this sucker? Anybody have an estimate? Like sales of past mag issues, it sounds like a possible business opportunity for PB.

DD:

I did a WAG with 9 threads I have saved as HTML files. This is the most compact way I know of to save them to disk. They look the same when you view them as they did originally. The downside is it uses maybe 20 files for each "page" of a thread.

These 9 threads varied from 6 to 17 posts each. Some of them (e.g. Condello's BG sexing method) contain a lot of photos. So I think they are fairly average.

I got an average storage space figure of 5.3 kB per post.

I just took a snapshot of the "Forum Home" screen, and it totals 44,388 posts from all the categories. Multiplying times 5.3 kB per post gives 235,256 kB or 229.75 MB as the estimated amount of storage space to hold the entire forum in HTML files. That's about a third of a CD-ROM.

Attention Bob and J.P.: I would pay $100 for a nice, shiny CD with a copy of the PB forum on it. Condello would too.

Dave- Someone with access to the server commands could put the whole "Ask the boss" file into a folder with special access. With a password we could retrieve the entire file. I doubt the file is any larger than 5GB, probably a lot less.
You know Dave, some of the programing we see today is stuck in the time that data storage was expensive and must be conserved at all cost. I see in your bio that you are a computer programmer. Now we have huge, super cheap hard drives that can store unbelievable amounts of data. My computer, which I built myself, has 100 GB of unused storage. I come to this web site several times a day for a update of new posts. The software downloads the same posts every visit to the thread. This uses bandwidth that could be saved if the thread was saved in a cache and only the new data was downloaded to your computer. I started programing in 1973 on a IBM system 3. The trend of data storage piety has been in the forefront of programming for so long that it is inherent in all software paradigms. Do you think that user disk caches could save gigabytes of bandwidth from a server for a forum such as this? I sometimes receive the same thread page 5 times in a day. I have fallen a little behind the times in programming and would like the opinion of someone with more recent involvement. Is there a good reason for the way internet servers send out the same information over and over? Maybe it is because they get paid by the bandwidth usage.

So would I!

In a heartbeat.

I'm in for $100...come on Bob, the PB archives are worth their weight in gold ! Remember what we lost in 2002-2003 when the server crashed !

I'd pay $100. I'd even pay more if we had too. It just might be too tough of a decision what to save and what to toss. I'm sure everyone would have a different opinion of what rates as "quality" content.

PF2, if you continue to make posts like that, with all the computer talk, I'll have no choice but to pull out my Commodore 64 and my Apple IIe and school you.

I make all of my posts on an Atari 2000. What's wrong with that?

Id ante up for a CD.

FB

It doesn't take too many mistakes in pond management to eat up a hundred smackers. I'll bet ownership of such a CD could save me thousands, personally.

J.P. received an email yesterday informing him our monthly bandwidth (data transer)limit has been exceeded. Our hosting package includes a monthly bandwidth allotment, and the hosting company reserves the right to stop serving any site who exceeds its allotment. The email further informed J.P. that we could purchase additional bandwidth or upgrade the hosting package. He was urged to act immediately, so was in the process of making phone calls today to be able to help us make the correct decision. Another option we have is to change hosts. That's the most expensive, because of software issues transferring all the info on the forum.
J.P. is planning a trip to Pond Boss world headquarters Thursday to help us make a number of decisions.

Bob-You could also set up your own server and backup. I think Theo has a good idea. Selling the past "Ask the Boss" CD's and also, I would buy all pre 2005 magazines on a CD for another $100. I just found the website when I built my pond and would love to have the past information without having to spend so much. If you sell 500 @ $100= 50K minus small expense for organizing the Data and burning the CD's!

Sunil and Bruce- You guys should retire those machines and get at least a 386! LOL! I sent several 386's to the scrap heap last year. Could not even give them away, although they worked fine. I was hung up on big iron when the PC revolution happened. I missed out on all those billions that were made. :p

PFF, you must have misread my profile. I'm actually a recovering programmer. Been darned successful at it, too. Actually, I started out as a machine language programmer on a 4K IBM 1401 before some/most of the PB posters were born. My first PC was a Radio Shack TRS80 (Trash80).I still think fondly of BIG IRON. In those days, cartoons showed us as mad scientists. I finally achieved my Peter Principle as Head of Systems Development Technology for a Fortune 10 Company. On a scale of 1 to 10, I'm a -17 in politics and got out. For the last 25+ years, I've been selling and renting programmers.

These days, I call friends children to find the ON button. As a recovering addict, part of my therapy includes not learning how to post pond pics and download threads. Under adult supervision, I am allowed to replenish the paper in the printer. A really good tech support group is key to my recovery. For example, I think I posted some of this last night but neglected to hit SUBMIT.

I would pay for the CD also.

I dislike banner ads and would pay to support the website without ads. Perhaps a premium magazine subscription?

Frank

Sorry to hear that your KayPro finally crashed, Bruce. :p

Bruce's REALLY first computer.....Uniblab

Ahhh, the TRS-80....what fond memories of basic programming.....learning to make the screen go solid magenta....such a fine piece of machinery.