Things are finally beginning to settle a bit. We off-loaded Citation Machine yesterday to an other hosting company (my third) where we are paying for the highest bandwidth available (192 GB) without going to a dedicated server. We calculated that we could serve 70,000 citations a day without going over our quota, so I wrote some code that would switch CM off after 70,000. Well, it switched off after just five and a half hours. Bummer!
We’re going to think this through and maybe run it by half day, 35,000 in the morning and 35,000 in the afternoon. I’m not sure yet how we will work this.
The long term solution is distribution. We have to get Citation Machine on many servers. So I am currently rewriting the code so that it can easily be downloaded from my server and installed on a school or media center web server and made available to local students. CM will be design this time so that citations are described in a code that I’m calling citation mapping. Essentially, you will be able to add citation styles that you use regularly (say government documents) that were not included in my Citation Machine. Brenda is currently coding the citations, and she’s never programmed before. That’s N E V E R. So you have a tool that you can grow locally.
We will be licensing CM. A lot of work is going into this, and we have taken on extra expenses splitting our tools out to other servers so that they will run more reliably — and those efforts continue.
Anyway, it’s been a tough few days. I just wanted you to know that my wits and humor are still with me. ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar ar!