Old News at The STArchive

This outlines the history of The STArchive from its inception to the date of its re-release, 2 Sep 2004. Back references to the site's old structure have been removed. The most recent entries appear first.

31 Aug 2004

Spent many late evenings over the last few months wrangling Perl and herding hypertext markup into some very evil arrangements to produce this site's second incarnation. Let's hope I haven't forgotten anything...

22 Oct 2003

Inspiration has struck (ow!) and I have begun the redesign of this site in earnest. Note that my first mention of this task was back in 2001. Since I'm aiming for the tenth anniversary in September of next year, I'm getting started now. After all, I *am* a professional procrastinator.

1 Aug 2003

Taking a vacation this month. Which days, you ask? All of 'em.

14 May 2003

Yanked the Guests page. Links to it will be phased out when (if?) my redesigned site is rolled-in.

16 Apr 2003

There are problems at the original PsiPhi site (currently, redirected) and so David has set-up an interim location for some of his things.

9 Jan 2003

Curiosity about the number of hits to the search script has made me plug in a counter on that page. Let's see what turns up...

3 Jan 2003

Oh. Right. Happy New Year. Hopefully, no one tried to sign the guest list because it just got created today.

18 Dec 2002

Expanded all film entries to use the format

Star Trek[ II| III| IV| V| VI]: $FILM_NAME

which may reduce collisions (Nemesis) and should be more Google friendly.

17 Dec 2002

Star Trek Nemesis details added (to the best of my ability).

26 Sep 2002

Thanks to Curt Danhauser for shipping me "Desert Crossing"; my lists are once again up to date.

5 Sep 2002

For years, the references to episode titles in my Expanded ship and Location lists linked back to the episode listings at either Caltech (when it was there) for TNG and PsiPhi for Deep Space Nine, most of Voyager, and most recently, Enterprise. There was never any references for the original series or for the feature films. Today, I have rewritten all of those links to point to the Spoiler-free Opinion Summaries where there is not only a brief summary and rating for every series and film but links to the same episode listings I was using in the past as well as links to other useful sites, such as StarTrek.com. I hope this new consistency is found to be useful.

4 Sep 2002

I'm afraid I missed "Desert Crossing" once again. I'll do my best to enlist some assistance to get the missing details.

5 Jul 2002

Added entries to the Expanded ship list from various on-screen displays, courtesy of Brian Barjenbruch and time spent with his DVD player.

14 Jun 2002

The "Desert Crossing" episode was aired at a rather odd time and so it was not caught for inclusion in my own lists; hopefully, I'll catch it in reruns this summer.

20 Feb 2002

Added colourized fore and profile images of NX Class Enterprise (courtesy of Curt Danhauser) to the Expanded ship list.

25 Jan 2002

David Henderson is renewing his efforts to document episode information, credits, and other tidbits again at Psi Phi with the new series, Enterprise. I have resumed linking episode titles to these summaries.

2 Jan 2002

Happy Palindromic New Year.

1 Dec 2001

Installed new version of David Wells' A History of Ships Named Enterprise.

9 Nov 2001

Yanked the Awards page. Links to it will be phased out when (if?) my redesigned site is rolled-in.

4 Oct 2001

Added an Enterprise NX-01 to the rotating splash page graphics for the Expanded ship list.

26 Sep 2001

Enterprise premiered and I'm interested again. But there were enough bad points to keep me wary.

5 Jun 2001

Andrew Tong's site has reappeared on Caltech under a new hierarchy and reformatted. The links to ST:TNG embedded throughout the Expanded ship list and the Location list have been re-introduced.

28 May 2001

Star Trek: Voyager ends with a rather dull and uninspired finale. I'm not sure I'm looking forward to the next series at all...

13 Dec 2000

Well, it appears "Nightingale" was left out of the broadcast loop, locally. The lists are being posted without that information, I'm afraid. Addendum: things are back to normal as "Nightingale" has since aired.

4 Dec 2000

The local station seems confused about what to air. I'm refraining from updates to give them a chance to air a missed episode before my posting date. If they don't, I'll post regardless.

27 Sep 2000

Brigitte Jellinek's ancient site has moved.

13 Jul 2000

Andrew Tong's site has once again been removed form the Caltech web server. I've removed all links from this site to it, and have included a notice from my splash page's ST:TNG link.

9 May 2000

Caught up with previous episodes. And the ankle is doing fine, thanks.

27 Apr 2000

Installed new version of David Wells' A History of Ships Named Enterprise.

24 Apr 2000

Updated Ron Carman's site relocation on the 'Other Sites' page.

27 Mar 2000

I've (possibly) broken my ankle. Updates, including the most recent VOY "Good Shepherd", will be postponed for a few days. Ow.

14 Mar 2000

With David Henderson's recent changes at Psi Phi, newer episodes of Star Trek: Voyager will not have backlinks to episode guide pages.

8 Nov 1999

Included a clean Type 10 shuttle and Delta Flyer image (courtesy of Curt Danhauser) to the Expanded ship list.

5 Nov 1999

Caught up on updates from episodes which aired during my vacation.

4 Oct 1999

I will be on vacation until November.

13 Aug 1999

Due to abuse, I've removed my Mail Box CGI form.

14 May 1999

Luca Sambucci's domain seems to have vanished into the ether. Links to his site have been removed.

31 Mar 1999

I've yet to receive official word confirming this, but the Andrew Tong's site seems to have been revived at Caltech, only under a different path.

25 Feb 1999

Andrew Tong's site has been removed from the Caltech web server by the administrative staff. I've removed all links from this site to it, and have included a notice from my splash page's ST:TNG link.

10 Feb 1999

Just for fun, I created a script to rotate through different splash graphics on the Expanded ship list once each day. Let's see how it's received.

4 Feb 1999

Added more details gleaned from the display consoles in ST VI: TUC and finally added images from the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual to the Expanded ship list.

2 Feb 1999

Installed new version of David Wells' A History of Ships Named Enterprise.

13 Jan 1999

Made a majority of the necessary revisions to the Expanded ship list and the Location list based on the recently released Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Technical Manual.

18 Dec 1998

Modified the Expanded ship list with some clarifications graciously provided to me by Larry Nemecek.

16 Dec 1998

Updated both the basic and Expanded ship lists, as well as the Location list with information from Star Trek: Insurrection.

25 Aug 1998

Added information from Star Trek: Voyager: Mosaic and Star Trek: Voyager: Pathways by Jeri Taylor. Thanks to David Henderson for the references. Although presented in fictional stories, this information will be considered as acceptable as the "fiction" that is produced by other Paramount staffers such as Okuda or Sternbach.

3 Aug 1998

Joe Reiss' Spoiler-free Opinion Summary, or SOS, has moved again. Good luck, Joe. :-)

14 Jul 1998

Updated search CGI: using Perl now to build results with relevent headers for each hit. Thanks to David Henderson for the code.

1 Jul 1998

Happy Canada Day!

The STArchive is a proud founding member -- along with the SOS and Psi Phi -- of The Bermuda Trekangle.

Updated search CGI: abend when passed no keywords rather than process in order to keep the logs clean.

22 Jun 1998

Updated search CGI: set both lists as default and added Borg, Dominion, and Kazon subheadings to ships selection.

18 Jun 1998

Device containing counter files full; fixed at 12:20 CDT; counters are out 12 hours worth of hits.

16 Jun 1998

Created a redirect from the "www.ee" server to the "www.cs" server using .htaccess.

9 Jun 1998

Well, a month after the move, the "www.ee" site has some 9700 hits, while the "www.cs" site has 5700. That's almost a 50% loss! I've now put in the META tag REFRESH on that old site to push visitors to the new site.

12 May 1998

Installed crontab entries to roll over counter files each day.

Created SSI dating of my list parts based on last modified dates.

Merged some records broken across lines and padded with keywords using the 'vim' editor which easily handles lines that are too long.

Finally (!) updated Location list, and the basic and Expanded ship lists.

11 May 1998

I must apologize for being so late with my updates to the ships and locations lists I maintain here. Besides this server move, Life(tm) in general can get pretty hectic. I will endeavor to update everything before I post to these lists to Usenet mid-month (only a few days away!).

8 May 1998

Set up a link on "www.ee" to redirect to here for now. I will eventually create a dynamic page there to catch all hits to files in my hierarchy and notify visitors of the change before pushing them here.

Updated my Thanks... page.

Combined all monthly guest list files into yearly files.

Made yearly file names and guest.cgi Y2K compliant.

Reconfigured my cgi-bin programs and fixed pages accordingly. For anyone who linked directly to my search program, the following path needs to change:

• /cgi-bin/djc_search becomes /~djc/cgi-bin/search.cgi

(similar changes for other cgi-bin programs, but I doubt anyone has a direct link to them :-)

Removed full absolute path URLs in favour or absolute-from-user-dir or relative paths.

Reconfigured counter files (still need crontab entry by sysadmin to zero out counters on a daily basis).

Wrote a script to hunt down "www.ee" references and change them to "www.cs". So far, it appears to have hit every page properly.

7 May 1998

After some four years on a stable server (and of course, 4 years worth of sites linking here and 4 years worth of indexes hitting this site), I'm going to mess it all up and move to a new server. :-) Effective immediately, the site at www.ee will be phasing out and the site at www.cs is live.

21 Apr 1998

The server here is experiencing difficulties on a daily basis lately. For many months now, I have been planning a move to a new local server under a new virtual domain name (making the entire site much more portable). I am in the process of securing this new server space and, eventually, all of pages here will be redirected to it. In the mean time, please excuse any downtimes you encounter. And my apologies.

18 Apr 1998

Included a colourized Prometheus Class profile (courtesy of Curt Danhauser) to the Expanded ship list.

4 Mar 1998

Updated all internal references to Psi Phi's new site.

3 Mar 1998

Installed new version of David Wells' A History of Ships Named Enterprise.

2 Mar 1998

Relinked to Psi Phi's new site.

28 Jan 1998

Plugged in black and white plan views of the Prometheus Class for my Expanded ship list. I'd thank whomever sent them to me, but they forged a fake return address and signed the message with only "The Admiral".

15 Jan 1998

Counter CGI reinstalled; splash page and search result page counters replaced.

13 Jan 1998

Installed David Wells' new look and new version of A History of Ships Named Enterprise.

12 Jan 1998

Installed a client-side image map to replace the server-side image map, thanks to David Henderson and my own laziness. See? Wait long enough and someone will do the work for you. :-)

2 Jan 1998

Unveiled the STArchive's new look and logo. Have a Happy New Year, everyone. Peace.

7 Dec 1997

Joe Reiss' Spoiler-free Opinion Summary, or SOS, has moved so I've updated the links here accordingly. Good luck, Joe. :-)

18 Nov 1997

Made a majority of the necessary revisions to the Expanded ship list based on the recently released Star Trek Encyclopedia Updated and Expanded Edition.

14 Nov 1997

Counters are no longer working. Sysadmin relocating directories involved so they may return when this work is complete (and I remember to plug them back in).

12 Nov 1997

While updating my basic and Expanded ship lists after this most recent story arc, I came to a conclusion: I really hate all those fleet shots in Deep Space Nine lately. I do. Sometimes I think the visual effects people are doing this just to drive me insane... :-)

13 Oct 1997

Updated awards page after receiving one from Whiskey, a most perceptive dog.

10 Oct 1997

Put a counter on the search engine's results page and added another crontab entry to reset this value every midnight.

9 Oct 1997

I have changed <Unnamed> entries in the Expanded ships list to include the class name, if known (ie, <Unnamed Nebula Class>). This should give some context to the results returned from the search engine, which strips off class identifying headers.

8 Oct 1997

Wrote a script and linked all Deep Space Nine and Voyager title references in my Expanded ships list and Locations list to the episode information archived at Psi Phi.

26 Sep 1997

Included Psi Phi in the search engine notification of a one week delay of new information, as David Henderson is now using it through his site's episode listings.

22 Sep 1997

Removed the mirror links button: after almost two years, the mirror ftp site is no longer participating with this site's archives.

16 Sep 1997

Modified the search engine to dynamically inform SOS users in particular of the (at least) one week delay of new information if their request produces no results.

15 Sep 1997

Finally updated both the basic and Expanded ship lists with information from Star Trek: First Contact.

7 Sep 1997

Included a Sovereign Class USS Enterprise profile (courtesy of Curt Danhauser) to the Expanded ship list.

1 Aug 1997

Added Joshua's old notations on Starfleet registry codes and ship types to the Expanded ship list.

30 Jul 1997

Linked to Joshua Bell's new home for his Mini-FAQs and updated his e-mail address in the Expanded ship list.

15 Jul 1997

From the direction the two series' are going, I've split out the Borg and Dominion entries as individual files/sections in the Expanded ship list.

I've carried over the black background motif into all other windows.

14 Jul 1997

Updated the ftp server's plain-text archive of Mark Holtz' List of Lists and added a pointer to his existing web site in the image map.

3 Jul 1997

Included a USS Defiant profile (courtesy of Curt Danhauser) to the Expanded ship list.

20 Jun 1997

Updated image map links to Joshua Bell's site to inform visitors about his current off-line situation.

22 May 1997

The splash page's ST:TOS link has been updated to point to a live site. The quick reference guide still exists locally.

25 Apr 1997

Updated awards page after receiving one from Angel Swan.

23 Apr 1997

Updated awards page to reflect Kasey Chang's site relocation for the Star Trek Nexus.

17 Apr 1997

Added to the awards page a "belated" Top Award from Christoph Reuter.

16 Apr 1997

After missing a month, finally updated the Location list, and the basic and Expanded ship lists. Apologies, but Real Life(TM) can tend to get in the way of these things...

Updated awards page for the Best Trek of the Week site (formerly known as the Star Trek Site of the Night).

26 Mar 1997

Award from Luca Sambucci's Best of Trek site.

15 Feb 1997

Updated HTML version of Andrew Main's Stardates in Star Trek FAQ, as well as the related program files.

Reverse ordered the awards page, putting most recent items first.

29 Jan 1997

A Five-Star award from the Editors of Luckman Interactive in their newest book and interactive CD-ROM.

14 Jan 1997

Updated Location list, and the basic and Expanded ship lists.

10 Jan 1997

New version of A History of Ships Named Enterprise FAQ put up for David Wells, which includes information from Rick Sternbach about the Enterprise-E.

20 Dec 1996

The Christmas break at this University occurs from Dec 21 1996 through Jan 5 1997, inclusive. During that time, the server hosting these pages will be running unattended.

12 Dec 1996

Updated Location list, and the basic and Expanded ship lists.

3 Dec 1996

New version of A History of Ships Named Enterprise FAQ put up for David Wells.

26 Nov 1996

I obtained a very nice image of the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-E by scanning a Rice Crispies(tm) cereal box cover, cleaning up the fake phaser fire, and removing any exploded Crispies that were visible. :-)

13 Nov 1996

Updated Location list, and the basic and Expanded ship lists.

8 Nov 1996

Added many new Federation ship image profiles (courtesy of Curt Danhauser) to the Expanded ship list.

1 Nov 1996

Updated Jason Hinson's plain text archive of Relativity and FTL Travel and Subspace Physics.

1 Oct 1996

New version of A History of Ships Named Enterprise FAQ put up for David Wells.

19 Sep 1996

Updated the image map and alt-index to add:

• a local FTP copy of a ST:TOS Quick Reference Guide
• Star Trek: The Original Series

15 Sep 1996

Award from the Best Trek of the Week site (formerly known as the Star Trek Site of the Night).

7 Sep 1996

Award from the United Space Federation.

19 Aug 1996

Award from the Star Trek Nexus.

12 Aug 1996

New version of A History of Ships Named Enterprise FAQ put up for David Wells.

Updated to the new URL for Jason Hinson's Relativity and FTL Travel FAQ, and new text versions put up on the ftp server.

11 Aug 1996

Award from the Shakaar Society for the month of August.

2 Aug 1996

Added an awards page to accomodate the number of awards and acknowledgements this site is accumulating.

Updated splash-graphic and map file accordingly.

Award from Yoyodyne.

20 Jul 1996

Award from Trekker Net.

18 Jul 1996

Testing wwwcount2.2 at the bottom of the splash page, along with a crontab entry to reset this count value every midnight. It seems to load quickly enough so far...

2 Jul 1996

The poll results are in: 298 for; 21 against.

31 May 1996

Installed a one question poll to help me decide if the creation of another list would be worth my while.

13 May 1996

To offer some better sources to this material, the image map now links to David Henderson's Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Archive and Star Trek: Voyager Archive at Psi Phi, as well as to Andrew Tong's Star Trek: The Next Generation site.

9 May 1996

Mark Holtz returns once more with updates to three of his List of Lists, as well as the introduction of a fourth to the series on Star Trek: Voyager.

17 Apr 1996

The server seems to have been fixed up and cgi-bin processing is now continuing as before. However, I'll retain the link to the alternate index in case of any future "emergencies".

4 Apr 1996

Added an HTML version of Andrew Main's Stardates in Star Trek FAQ, as well as the related program files and man pages (compressed, tar'ed, uuencoded).

Updated the image map accordingly.

25 Mar 1996

There have been intermittent problems with the server's swap space: httpd requires a small portion when doing certain cgi-bin processing (ie: image maps), and so some calls fail. Although not a complete solution, an alternate index is provided until things are fixed up at this end. Apologies...

21 Mar 1996

Very poor performance by the wwwcount2.2 program. I found myself waiting longer for it to load than the initial image map graphic, sometimes by several orders of magnitude! The counter has since been removed.

18 Mar 1996

I don't know why I do this, but I've gotten around to having wwwcount2.2 installed. A test counter will be up for a few days so I can evaluate its preformance. Comments/complaints welcomed.

13 Feb 1996

Modified the search engine to accomodate Joe Reiss and his SOS pages by installing default parameters ( search both lists, case insensitive, boolean and ). Only an episode name needs to be passed now.

9 Feb 1996

Replaced simple blue line rules to more Okudagram-style look for the intro page and my own FAQs.

Revamped the layout and access links to images on file in the Expanded ship list. Full colour profiles are now available for most ship classes.

1 Feb 1996

Updated links to Joshua Bell's FAQ material ( Mini-FAQs and ASCII Art ) now residing at DimensionX out of San Francisco, California, USA. Congratulations on the new job, Josh!

12 Jan 1996

Added a Mirror Sites button to the image map. Its purpose should be self-explanitory. :-)

3 Jan 1996

Award from Eye Magazine.

20 Dec 1995

Added a "Preview" option to the guest list to minimize multiple entries and/or entry mistakes.

14 Dec 1995

Installed a slick new image map handling source: users of text-only browsers or those who disable image loading can now select the image map anchor link. Instead of facing an error, they will be presented with a break-down of all the links built into the image map.

Removed the (now) extraneous text-based links within the title page.

13 Dec 1995

The Solaris upgrade on the server changed the way many of the formatted links in the search engine's results were generated. This should be fixed now.

13 Nov 1995

The access counter was removed due to ongoing inconsistencies between its calculated value and the hits recorded in the server logs. Besides which, it's not fun anymore. :-)

Revamped the image map page to be a bit cleaner and more concise.

31 Oct 1995

Mark Holtz returns with an updated Star Trek: The Next Generation section to his List of Lists

14 Sep 1995

Found and corrected a bug in the search engine which generated incorrect URL backlinks.

11 Sep 1995

Jason's HTML version of Subspace Physics has been returned to him. The ftp archive still remains at this site.

30 Aug 1995

Updated the search engine to catch a loophole in the search string parsing.

13 Jul 1995

I got tired of running my bi-weekly count of accesses: installed an "odometer-style" counter instead. Apologies to those without graphical browsers.

The ASCII graphic was removed to conform with HTML 3.0 (Beta) specifications - it won't legally parse as an ALT to the image map. I'm now using it in the README file on the ftp server.

27 Jun 1995

Reformatted both the Locations list and the Expanded ship list in order to create nicer, script generated plain text files for posting to Usenet and to allow for better searching with the search engine under development.

1 Jun 1995

Added Mini-FAQ: Stardates and updated the image map accordingly. Andrew Main will be working on an HTML version to be put on the web side.

7 Apr 1995

Expanded the image map's overall space and added two new FAQs:

• ST:VOY Quick Reference Guide
• A History of Ships Named Enterprise

27 Mar 1995

Created a less image-intensive Expanded ship list by removing inline ship images and making these alternative pages available.

1 Mar 1995

The access count displays a more accurate number of hits to this site's entry point than an automated page counter would. It's taken from local logs and excludes hits from the machines I use when testing or installing. Updated counts will be put up fairly regularly.

15 Feb 1995

Interlaced the image map for Netscape browsers. The image suffers from a slight dithering effect ( or colour loss ) in Netscape which is not too serious. Mosaic browsers suffer no loss in image quality. Notified MCOM, in case they cared. :-)

13 Feb 1995

Installed clickable image map for "spiffy" new look.

13 Jan 1995

Added a link to Paramount's official Star Trek Home Page.

10 Jan 1995

The Thanks... link was created.

The What's New? link was created, primarily from memory and access logs.

8 Nov 1994

Did a bit of searching and found a nice ASCII-art font for the title graphic's ALT reference. Tweaked and installed. Lynx users need something pretty too, don't they?

5 Oct 1994

Added a link to my Mail Box CGI form.

1 Oct 1994

Finally got around to linking in Josh's ASCII ships to each class reference in the Expanded ships list.

21 Sep 1994

Added a link to my Guest List.

The homepage was moved to index.html and welcome.html became a pointer (which was eventually removed altogether).

2 Sep 1994

The Star Trek Archive is born.

Added Jason Hinson's two FAQs to the ftp server:

• Subspace Physics
• Relativity and FTL Travel

Added banners for each group in the Expanded ships list, tweaked and coloured from various scanned images.

29 Aug 1994

Added links to all files on the ftp side of the archive.

25 Aug 1994

Andrew offered his HTML-ization of my Locations list back to me, which was summarily installed.

29 Jul 1994

With Andrew Tong's Perl script donation, I linked all ST:TNG references in my Expanded ships list and my Locations to his HTML-ization of the Tim Lynch episode reviews/synopses.

Sometime in early 1994 ...

Joshua Bell and I collaborated in order to upgrade my existing Ships listing and in doing so, created the Expanded ship listing.

I offered Josh ftp space to archive both his ASCII Art Archive and his Mini-FAQs. He accepted.

Back in late 1989 / early 1990 ...

The Locations and Ships lists were created. They had resided solely on the ftp side of the archive, since the web didn't really exist then. Oh sure, we had the coolness of ftp and "gopher space" and there was solid content out there, but kids these days never believe you...