From The Beginning To The Present
After many years online, I've decided it's high time for The Problem Site to have its own blog. So let me begin by giving a brief history of the site.
The site started with a very small idea - a Problem Of The Week page, hosted at Virtu Software. The page became quite popular in a short period of time, and I began to think it would be nice to have an entire site dedicated to weekly and monthly math problems. Thus, The Problem Site was born. It began with a weekly math problem, a weekly brainteaser, and a monthly math problem at a more difficult level. The monthly problem was posted each month by Graeme McRae, who did a great job writing problems. All his problems can still be found here: High School Math Problems.
Eventually I had the bright idea of adding some educational games to the site, but my intent was that these would be a "secondary" part of the site. Hangman, NullGee, One-to-Ten, and others were added.
For a period of two or three years I became very busy with other things, and hardly even looked at The Problem Site. Then, about a year and a half ago, I was astounded to look at some statistics and discover that I was getting several hundred of visitors each day, browsing the math problems, and playing the games. Now that "several hundred" has turned into a couple thousand, and still rising. When I discovered that school websites all over the world were sending their students to The Problem Site during their free time, I decided it was time to add more features to the site. Thus, the site was redesigned, and many new games added.
The problem and brainteaser section of the site is the last to get an overhaul, as it needs the greatest amount of work. I hope to have these pages back online by the beginning of the 2006-2007 school year.
And that brings me to the present. This has been a bit of a stressful week. Since the beginning, The Problem Site has been hosted with a company called Ready Hosting. For years we have had virtually no problems there, and the hosting has been quite satisfactory. However, the company just came under new management, and everything has been falling apart. They insisted on migrating this site to new servers by the end of this week, even though we all (including them) know that their new servers were unstable. So I gave them an ultimatum of sorts - if you want the site moved by April 1st, you must have your server problems resolved by March 27th.
Didn't happen.
So The Problem Site is joining in the exodus from RH - from the sounds of things, The Problem Site is not the only rat fleeing this sinking ship. But, of course, moving the site to a new server can result in all kinds of problems, and with more than 23 different educational games, as well as many resource and informational pages, this could be a horribly daunting task.
Because of the move, the site now has access to a more powerful database platform, so I'm working through each of the games, converting everything to the new platform. If all goes well, we won't see even a moment of downtime, and everything will continue even better than before! Stay tuned...
The site started with a very small idea - a Problem Of The Week page, hosted at Virtu Software. The page became quite popular in a short period of time, and I began to think it would be nice to have an entire site dedicated to weekly and monthly math problems. Thus, The Problem Site was born. It began with a weekly math problem, a weekly brainteaser, and a monthly math problem at a more difficult level. The monthly problem was posted each month by Graeme McRae, who did a great job writing problems. All his problems can still be found here: High School Math Problems.
Eventually I had the bright idea of adding some educational games to the site, but my intent was that these would be a "secondary" part of the site. Hangman, NullGee, One-to-Ten, and others were added.
For a period of two or three years I became very busy with other things, and hardly even looked at The Problem Site. Then, about a year and a half ago, I was astounded to look at some statistics and discover that I was getting several hundred of visitors each day, browsing the math problems, and playing the games. Now that "several hundred" has turned into a couple thousand, and still rising. When I discovered that school websites all over the world were sending their students to The Problem Site during their free time, I decided it was time to add more features to the site. Thus, the site was redesigned, and many new games added.
The problem and brainteaser section of the site is the last to get an overhaul, as it needs the greatest amount of work. I hope to have these pages back online by the beginning of the 2006-2007 school year.
And that brings me to the present. This has been a bit of a stressful week. Since the beginning, The Problem Site has been hosted with a company called Ready Hosting. For years we have had virtually no problems there, and the hosting has been quite satisfactory. However, the company just came under new management, and everything has been falling apart. They insisted on migrating this site to new servers by the end of this week, even though we all (including them) know that their new servers were unstable. So I gave them an ultimatum of sorts - if you want the site moved by April 1st, you must have your server problems resolved by March 27th.
Didn't happen.
So The Problem Site is joining in the exodus from RH - from the sounds of things, The Problem Site is not the only rat fleeing this sinking ship. But, of course, moving the site to a new server can result in all kinds of problems, and with more than 23 different educational games, as well as many resource and informational pages, this could be a horribly daunting task.
Because of the move, the site now has access to a more powerful database platform, so I'm working through each of the games, converting everything to the new platform. If all goes well, we won't see even a moment of downtime, and everything will continue even better than before! Stay tuned...
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