History of this web site:

• Version 1.0

  Leaving for college in the fall of 1996, I wanted to keep in touch with friends from high school. Having changed high schools to Arlington in the middle of my sophomore year in 1994, I knew how quickly people lost touch. However, this was the dawn of the internet bubble, and I decided it would be useful to try and organize online. On November 22nd, 1996, I sent out the following email:
  

  Attention all AHS alumni and current students: I have decided to start a real AHS student and alumni home page since I am currently running my own server, have an incredibly fast ethernet connection, have working HTML knowledge, and need something else to waste my time. The only way this will work if each and every one of you forward this to all the other AHS students and alumni you know that have email and/or web pages, but have not already received this. In addition to forwarding this message I ask that you reply to the following address with any or all of the following information (even those who received this message directly from me): ( Note: not all of these will apply to everyone) reply to: plavchan@cco.caltech.edu Name: Graduation class : (i.e. 1996) College attending: email address: snail mail address: web page url: (i.e. http://www.....) phone number: Any short message you would like to appear by your entry: (i.e. Caltech rocks!) As soon as I start getting responses I'll get this web site up and running within a day or two. I'll also submit it to Yahoo and other search engines ASAP and then a week or two after that, someone should be able to search for 'Arlington High School' and find this page. Also, send along any suggestion about what else you would like to find on this page. The address will be something like: http://plavchan.caltech.edu/users/ahs I'll begin work on 11/22/96 Peter

  
  Yes, I still have copies of email from 1996, which is pretty amazing in of itself. In any event, I was unprepared for the flood of email and submissions I would receive for this site. The concept of organizing AHS alumni online proved very popular. I began adding the entries to http://plavchan.caltech.edu/users/ahs/, where the site resided until Version 4.0 of this site. Within six days I received sixty emails and submissions. At the time I was maintaining all the entries on a single page, and this quickly proved cumbersome. The site needed a makeover...

• Version 2.0

  I'm not exactly sure when this version of the site came to be. The email record I do have tells only part of the story. I began using a web form to submit new entries to the web site, and on November 30th, 1996 I received the first of a new format for these submissions. Yes, this was only eight days after I started the site, but the internet moved fast then. I gave each new entry its own html file, and added the information by hand to the files. I then generated lists of these entries by class year, and added new features such as listing majors, and a search page.
  
  On October 12th, 1998, I added a counter, which would reach over 15,000 hits before I shut it down in 2002. I became adept at cutting and pasting from emails to html, but eventually the work caught up with me. At one point in 1999, I was eight months behind on adding the entries submitted. Furthermore, having over 700 separate html files made changes rather difficult to make. 1484 emails and 718 entries later in September 1999, I decided the site needed another overhaul...

• Version 3.0

  On September 24th, 1999, after writing the third version, I sent the following email to people listed on the site:
  

  Subject: Arlington High School Directory for Alumni and Current Students UPDATED! http://plavchan.caltech.edu/users/ahs/ I apologize for this mass-email, but this is not spam. At one point or another in the past three years, every one of you has submitted your entry to the Arlington High School Alumni site (and about another 30 people who did not submit an email address for a total of 718 entries - keep in mind I split up the recipient's list). I am writing to inform you that it has been updated! This was certainly a challenging feat since the last site update was in January (Caltech undegraduate Physics, a job at JPL and another job at a startup tech company keep me very busy). I even put off updating my own web site (http://plavchan.caltech.edu), but I'll be working on that tomorrow. So, you're all going to read this email and go check out the site (just for you to see what kind of traffic this site gets, the counter was at 6139 when I sent this message). Hopefully the server (a little P75 IBM Aptiva) won't crash, and I've already given up on avoiding a flood of new entries or updates. At least now I'll be able to handle them in a more timely manner (one to two weeks instead of 8 months). Also, feel free to forward this to any other alumni or current student not already in the directory. DO NOT send a reply or spam to everyone else on this list. So, let me tell you what's different and what's not: The site will look nearly identical to the old one, but instead of a page for every entry (plus pictures and other files and you have a thousand file web site), the entries have been collapsed into one database and two cgi programs. I've spent the past four days holed up in my room writing the cgi programs from scratch (this is what I do at the tech company I work for, so I'm good at it) and moving all the old entries to the new database, as well as putting the new entries (~200) in the database. This has several major implications: This faithful sysadmin will have a much, much easier time maintaining the site. Instead of modifying hundreds of page to make a minor change, I only have about a dozen. I have already made minor changes to how the entries look, a task that would have taken weeks under the old regime (in fact, this took so long I never did it). Updates are so much easier - I cranked through the 200 new entries and numerous updates in only the past two days. Due to limitations in the cgi program I have written, everyone is restricted to one email address for the time being. You are also limited to two pictures. I don't see any reason this needs to be changed in the near future. The search functionality has returned! After all, it was built into the CGI program (when you load an entry, the cgi program searches the database to find it first). The submission page has been altered. The second cgi program takes your submission and puts it in a format I can later take directly into the database. Under the old submission form, a prepackaged cgi program was used. Now the program is customized for the AHS site. It is also a bit more informative in showing you what you submitted so you can correct mistakes. You'll also find some new text or information here and there. Enjoy! As always, I'll take suggestions for features enough people wish to have added (like a bulletin board or chat room if there's enough interest). Finally, this site will be functional at least until June 2001 (when I will hopefully graduate). I am looking for a new host at that point, and any help would be appreciated (especially if you have contacts with the Arlington adminstration, who should transfer this site to their own arlington schools site). If worse comes to worse, I will take it with me to graduate school. The URL will change, but I'll try and keep everyone informed... Peter Plavchan AHS Class of '96, now at Caltech (yeah, we're #1) System Administrator for http://plavchan.caltech.edu, http://plavchan.caltech.edu/users/ahs/, http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~bfd/ Corporate Web Administrator for http://www.tanner.com, http://www.tanner-learning.com and http://www.reconfig-computing.com

  
  The new site was up and running, but once again I was unprepared for the popularity and work needed to maintain the site. Adding new entries simply required copying and pasting in Excel from one file to another, but my continually increasing academic load at Caltech proved too much and I stopped updating the site in December of 1999. It was around this time that I contacted the school district for help. Given that I would graduate in 2001 from Caltech (and my impossible workload in the meantime), the fate of my server remained uncertain. During the Christmas break of 1999, I met with Bob Markarian (at the time Arlington's Assistant Superintendent for Technology and Library Media Services) and the rather helpful Susan Christoffersen (District Web Site's Webmaster) to discuss handing over the site to them. I emailed back and forth with the district for the better part of the next year, and on November 13th, 2000 I received the following:
  

  From: Susan Christoffersen Subject: Alumni Database Hi, Peter, I see your note on the front page of the site; you must be swamped now as a senior and I see you are going on to grad school too........ I just wanted to touch base with you and bring you up to date on a couple of things. I had a meeting with Bob Markarian this morning and discussed the alumni database among other things. We have decided that we really don't want to take it over as it would inevitably take time away from our main focus on the Arlington district site. I did have one thought that might help though. There is a brand new Arlington Education Foundation which is just getting started up and the database might find a natural fit with the foundation, since it will undoubtedly be soliciting alumni for contributions. If you want to contact the foundation, you will find them here: Mark Metzger, President Arlington Education Foundation 696 Dutchess Turnpike Poughkeepsie, NY 12603 I hope this will help you find a home for the alumni database after you graduate. -- Susan Christoffersen, Webmaster Email to: webmaster@ArlingtonSchools.org Visit us: http://ArlingtonSchools.org/

  
  Unfortunately, the school district did not have the resources to maintain the site. The Arlington Education Foundation currently has a few pages on the District Web Site soliciting donations for the school district, but was not suited for taking over this web site altogether. Over the next year, I completed my degree requirements at Caltech and moved onto graduate school in physics at UCLA. I was once again able to return to development of my website...

• Version 4.0

  I managed to host the server at Caltech for the majority of the 2001-2002 academic year while I was at UCLA, until it suffered a hardware failure in May 2002. After running nearly continuously for over five and a half years, the Pentium 75MHz machine performed admirably (no pun intended). I have since started a new site here, on the Caltech undergraduate computer science cluster. My account has the unique benefits of allowing me to run my CGI programs from my account as well as to host this site for free. Until I establish a permanent home for this site with donations, I will be hosting the site here (probably for several years). There are a few drawbacks to hosting the site here and not on our own server, such as the disk space quota on my account. This site will no longer be able to have pictures of members as it used to, but you can link to pictures on your entry if you host them elsewhere on the web.
  
  Finally, the current version of this site overcomes the major drawback of previous versions - lack of complete automation. Entry addition and editing are now completely automated. At the time of this writing, the message boards and reunion scripts are still not complete, but they will be completely automated as well. They will also be integrated directly into the database for keeping track of who posts what and organizing reunions. Any changes you make to the site, will be immediately visible, and will not require constant updates on my part. Thus, the site will be free to grow and change by those of us who use it. I have added many other features to the site, including counters for every entry, displaying when entries were created and last updated on. All the accounts will be username and password protected, and the passwords are encrypted for additional security. Even if you forget your password or username, there is a program (see the support page) to automatically send - to your registered email address only - your username and password. Enjoy the new site.
  
  I am looking forward to selecting the decade representatives for the Alumni Council, as we get this Alumni Association up and running.

That's all for now. - Peter Plavchan, 5/31/2002

Site by Peter Plavchan, 2002.