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 Previous Item - D/H Beaver...History of an Iconic Workhorse
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The History of "Splash and Dash Seaplane Delights" |
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Don Maxwell - Jan 28,2021
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This site began in the late 1990's as a SeaRey kit builders' email list, hosted by, um, Yahoo, I think. By circa 2000 or 2001 most of the discussion had moved to a graphics-based site called "SOS Seaplanes"--or something like that--and hosted by MyFamily.com. A year or two after that, c. 2002 or 2003 I think, there was a Big Disagreement among several SeaRey builders, and the result was to split "SOS" into a pair of new MyFamily sites, "STS" (the SeaRey Technical Site) and "Splash and Dash Seaplane Delights." After that, everything was hunky-dory for a long time.
Then sometime around 2012, the people who ran the MyFamily hosting site (Ancestry.com, was it?) decided to close MyFamily. That turned out to be a Very Big Deal, because by then it was hosting thousands of sites. And there was no alternative host that had a similar architecture. AND by then most of the original MyFamily programmers had found other jobs, and those remaining were unable to figure out a means of exporting any site's data except as a very basic file--no way to identify images and link them to the text conversations that identified and connected them. So all of the hosted sites, including STS and Splash and Dash would just disappear from the Web and have to start over again, completely new and with no history anywhere.
Fortunately, Don White, a SeaRey builder and CS whiz, devoted nearly a whole year to reverse-engineering MyFamily, and in the end he was able to build the host we're communicating on now. Then the Great Migration began--the huge job of downloading all of the old data and images from MyFamily and making them accessible here.
That was a HUGE job. (I'm not a programmer, but have made enough html pages to have an inkling of how huge it was. HUGE.)
Somehow, Don White managed to connect almost all of the photos and text and get the old MyFamily STS and Splash sites looking and working well on this, his new, reverse-engineered host. There are a few goofy glitches that you might notice once in a while, when trying to follow a long thread created before the Great Migration; but in general it all works wonderfully well.
And by now it all works even better than the MyFamily version did--and MyFamily was clearly the best on the planet at the time. Don has created a new career for himself in the process, as he is hosting many hundreds, maybe many thousands, of sites like STS and Splash.
You can find Don's hosting service at https://goclub.us/
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Wayne Nagy - Jan 28,2021
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Don White is A M A Z I N G !!
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Dan Nickens - Jan 30,2021
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You are right, Wayne. He has done more for the SeaRey community than anyone but Kerry.
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John Dunlop - Jan 30,2021
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Dan, more so because you and I know that SeaRey production would likely have ceased as we currently know it...
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