RaymerFamilies.com

Why we are online:
This is an Attempt for me to give a brief history of the Raymer Family Sites as they’ve evolved.

In the late 90’s Elmore and Lucille Raymer passed away, we’d all grown up visiting them for holidays and many times throughout the year, they were, for many of us the Hub that held our family together, during the few months that passed between this and the first Christmas without them, I was worried we’d fall apart unless we could continue to communicate.

In 1999 I made a “Free” ad based website, just 3 pages large, with Microsoft Publisher (ouch) the URL of this site was “http://raymerfamily.homepage.com“, it was a bit of a hit I’d think.. everyone loved to see it and read the little news snips, and see pics of Sarah which I uploaded quickly, it was simple, free, and easy.

The next year brought the “Dot-Com Bust” and sites like homepage.com couldn’t stay afloat anylonger.. turns out, they were banking that people would advertise thru them and those ads would be displayed on your content, well 90% of the ads were from homepage.com themselves..

Getting Serious.
Not shortly after hearing they were going under, I opened an account with a company called “Freeservers.com” and they hosted the New and Improved Raymer Family Site now written with Dreamweaver (still static) and I let my creativity flow a little, the site looked better was a little more interactive, and was much larger.. also.. we had our first Domain name.. Raymerfamily.org.

Getting Interactive
This account was still pretty simple, as I got more into Linux, I found PHP.. so in 2002, I decided since I’d been playing with it at work, and I loved what it would do, I moved our website to a new Host named “Dixiesys” they had Linux servers, shell accounts, and most importantly, PHP.
I setup “phpnuke” and I moved all the entries over in a day, all 200 of them. I was so excited.. this would be perfect, I could setup a truly interactive site.. I could log in make a post.. all of you could log in and make a post.. it was a bit cryptic, but sooo nice. I added functions to Nuke.. left and right.. I was sort of a Nuke Whore almost..

MORE SPACE!
I started playing with Photo Management scripts, and how to integrate them into Nuke.. but i had an issue.. I needed a program called “ImageMagick” to be supported on my host server AND i needed more SPACE for all these files. I moved the host from Dixiesys to a cheaper host, with more space and support for what I needed. I integrated “Coppermine”and I upload a few thousand pictures and everyone was super excited to see these.. I was pretty jazzed too..

HACKED!
One morning in 2005(?) i think I woke to find that the site was disabled, and an email from the support team that our site had been hacked. I looked into it and found that both the Coppermine gallery had a serious flaw in it’s coding and the people who developed it, were no longer interested in repairing it. I moved immediatley, I removed all the photo’s and then installed “Menalto Gallery” which we use still..

Death of Raymerfamily.org
So.. 2006 was a crappy year for me, barley able to survive financially, going thru a breakup, the Site took a back seat to EVERYTHING else in my life, I found out later that the payments for the site (which mom had taken over for me) had been delayed like.. 7 months. and the Domain name expired and was snatched up by a squatter. I was upset, I felt like I’d let you all down. We lost: The original site info, all the entries, all the old pics (but we had backups or that) and of course the site was replaced with an “ad” page thats still up today.

Birth of a new site
Christmas was coming, I’d gotten a new job, and we needed a Site.. I put on my big boy pants, did some research and found a very good very cheap host, I installed some software and started playing around again.. by December.. Raymerfamilies.com was up and running.. I’d ditched Nuke.. in favor of “Wordpress” which was much easier to use..

The Future of the Site:
I’ve been planning lots of features for the future.. but the thing that we miss the most here on the site is cooperation, I’ve always wanted this site to be a forum for us all to communicate thru, now that I’ve moved to another State, it’s pretty hard for me to push that idea, but I’d still like to see it work.

One feature I’m working on developing is an Online Library and Media database, Online Memorial Pages for people we’ve lost, and a real online Forum, one we can use to collborate on topics with.

So that my dear family is how this site came to be.. and how hard I have worked on it for you.
-Todd