I fully anticipated the technical and cognitive challenge of this undertaking, but I underestimated how long it would take me. And I was totally unprepared for the emotional impact.
From the technical perspective, the project was complex. Our existing legacy site was built on a version of Drupal that would reach its end-of-life (EOL) by the end of 2022. The current Drupal version was not simply an upgrade of the previous versions, but was a re-coding to take advantage of new technology and internet standards. This meant that unlike previous site upgrades, I could not simply update the back end and leave the content intact.
Instead, I had to design a new structure, then build a new scaffold or framework withs its functionalities, and then migrate the old content into the new container, and then design a 'theme' or 'skin' for the user interface. There was no 'out-of-the-box' script or module for migrating the content, so for some pieces I wrote my own export-import scripts (quite a learning process - something I had never before attempted) and for some I used the laborious copy-paste approach. I took this as an opportunity to first simplify the underlying site organization, make navigation easier, and weed out duplications, obsolete materials and other 'cruft'. Overall, about 750 posts and pages were reduce to about 500 in the new site.
In addition to a sense of satisfaction at having completed a long and complex task that involved learning a number of new skills, I have a new appreciation of our Class and what a joy it is to be a part of 'us'.
It has been stunning over the last 12 months to carefully re-read so many posts about classmates and their friends and families. What an incredible and complex family we are! I am honored to be a part of our Class. I also carefully read each of the 132 obituaries before and after migrating them, sometimes finding and adding previously missing published obituaries or photos. This part of the process threatened to overwhelm me at times and I frequently had to step away for several days. There were people whose passing left holes in my personal universe (David Prentice, Kari Prager, Lowell Richards, Ned Symes, Mike Hermann, Tim Stein) and remembering them made me very sad. But there were also people whose passing triggered a sense that I had only just begun getting to know them and that 10 more years would have been so wonderful (Terry Robinson, Bob ‘Lefty’ Lefkowits). Therer were some whom I knew and now wish I had made an effort to know better (Peter Komanecky, Bob Lundquist, Fred Ochs). And far, far too many whom I never really had a chance to know, though reading about them and their lives made me wish I had known them. There were a handful whose obituaries I found particularly painful, such as those with no published obituary to make a place for them in my/our memory. Two were in my freshman dorm: Fred Byrd and Phillip Morris, both of whom I knew and liked but who vanished from my life - and who seem to have vanished in a larger sense.
As I write these words, I am within sight of the finish line. The scaffold is built, a new theme created, a new and simpler organizational schema put in place, the salient content migrated, and lots of cruft discarded. I have a few closing details to check and tests to do, but I anticipate the rebuilt site going live in the next 24 hours.
If you are reading this, I have a message for you: reach out and make the effort to connect with classmates and the class. Today is precious and tomorrow is not guaranteed.
Peter Elias