AcadiaGeeks
This article is about AcadiaGeeks the website. For the #acadiageeks IRC channel, see AcadiaGeeks IRC Channel.
AcadiaGeeks is a forum based web site originally co-designed and co-programmed by Mark Veinot (Vic) and Sean Murphy. Written entirely in Perl and HTML 4.01 Traditional to the best of our collective abilities, it served as a central hub for geek news at Acadia for about 3 to 4 years since its inception during Spring of 2000. It has been primarily hosted on Vic's personal server mvgrafx which he runs from his home.
Originally the site was intended to be a distribution node for a radio show similar to Geeks in Space which was a pre-recorded downloadable show that the Slashdot.org crew had done. Essentially an early form of podcast, we were hoping to have topical discussions about geek news. The website was going to be merely a place to host the shows for download and provide a place to discuss them.
Unfortunately, Sean and Vic proved to be too lazy and lacking in discussion topics to ever throw together even one episode. So the website which was designed to host them ended up being retooled to simply act as a text-based forum for discussion of any even remotely geek related topic.
The early version of the site was based soley on a hand crafted text-file based storage system. It wasn't until Sean and Vic gained some experience with the PostgreSQL database that the site was converted to a database back-end with features like a user account system, polls, and full featured administration section. It was around this time that Darrell Rhodenizer joined our creative team of programmers and began to contribute code to the project.
Throughout the years the AcadiaGeeks website served as a place for Sean, Vic, and Darrell to practise their Perl programming and try out new ideas. A host of new features were implemented as tests of programming skills such as threaded comments, cookies, additional security, etc. Vic eventually converted the majority of the HTML code to be XHTML 1.0 compliant - mostly over one painstaking evening in an attempt to have the page render the same on Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Konqueror.
The codebase for AcadiaGeeks served as a co-final project between Sean and Vic in their last year at Acadia. Since the bulk of the code was already written, all that was required for handing in a finished product were a few minor code cleanups, thorough commenting and a fairly complete set of system documentation. For their work, Sean and Vic both received A's for the AcadiaGeeks website.
The prospect of a free (as in beer and as in speech) forum for discussion attracted a slew of editors and contributors. The forum thrived in its early days and actually attracted a fair bit of attention during its heyday, even having a rather complimentary article written about it in the Acadia student newspaper.
Various professors and Acadia administration persons have accounts on the site and had been known to post from time to time. We even had a "celebrity" post from a web-comic artist that we linked to at one point.
Over the years however, and especially since the graduation from Acadia of the founding members, the site had fallen into disuse. When once it was not uncommon to see several new article submissions in a single day, the average at the time it was derelected was closer to 3-4 articles per year. It was in the Fall of 2006 that co-creator Vic decided it was time for a change and set up MediaWiki in place of the years of code that once graced the acadiageeks URL. Sometime after this the code for the original site was lost.
During 2010, Vic unearthed a recent backup of the database from the site and built a read-only version of the site in PHP around the data so that articles and comments could be searched, browsed, read and preserved for posterity. It coexists with the wiki site.
