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Web-Based Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the looks-strangely-familiar dept.

Mike Caprio wrote in to say that there now is a official web-based Hitch Hiker's Guide available. What is strangest to me is the stunning similiarities between it and Everything. Pretty cool.

1 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. The word from the horse's mouth by yoz · · Score: 5

    Dammit dammit dammit. We really didn't need our pipe /.ed right now.

    Okay, here's the deal. There we were, four of us Digital Village techies, standing in the British Library with Douglas sitting between us and the cameras, and we're quite happily browsing the site no problem.

    7:30pm: The programme starts.

    7:31pm: 3 gazillion British net users click from the BBC site straight through to h2g2.com all at once. PerlEx and IIS go mental. Boom.

    (Fortunately we managed to turn that to our advantage: Douglas got to say that the site was so popular that it couldn't take the strain.)

    Now, several hours later, the site is unusable from the outside. However, it's not NT's fault, as the server's fine; it's the pipe. We're only on a T1. We're frantically moving various images off to mirror sites now, hopefully that should help all you guys actually get in and see the thing.

    We're really proud of it, as it goes, and some other people seem to quite like it too. Everything didn't inspire the site but we did look at it several times while we were designing. (Everything is similar in some ways, but not many - however, I still have a lot of admiration for Everything's features, and we'll be trying to send h2g2 in that direction as time goes on, as well as many other directions too... we've got a lot of big plans, and we're not going to sit still)

    So, yeah, it runs on NT, but there are reasons for that. (even though that may be unthinkable to some /.ers, who obviously have never had to do a professional site on a tight budget and deadline) And a good chunk of the blame for any site instability goes to Perl and PerlEx (which manages to throw away 50MB every time it restarts an interpreter... can someone please show ActiveState how to check for memory leaks?)

    But I would hope that the server system comes second in you guys minds to the fact that it's the Hitchhiker's Guide! The real thing! Online! And you can contribute!

    Come on... hands up everyone who doesn't want to be a Guide Researcher. Thought so.

    So, traffic permitting, we hope everyone can log on, join in and fulfil at least one childhood dream.

    -- Yoz