My Racing Bio Closing Down

[Russell2566]

For a few years I have provided free hosting and and spent tons of hours on the My Racing Bio site. A few months ago I decided I would no longer be able to justify all of the costs; heck I'm not even able to race this year due to my current work/life balance.

I have offered to carry forward the My Racing Bio site branded as a CCS product and to focus some more development time on the product simply in return for the future hosting costs that until this point I have been personally been paying for. That said, CCS has not shown any interest in picking up these costs. After a few un-returned emails the fact that I have not been sent any race results since my first email, I can only come to certain conclusions.

As a result, I will be closing down the My Racing Bio in the next 4 weeks or so. I apologize for the disappointment that this may create. While not everyone uses the site, I am amazed every month at the traffic numbers that the site gets for such a small group and zero publicity/marketing.

[IFMracing]

Damn.
I can understand your position, and I will miss the site.

Thanks for taking the effort to have it up there for us in the first place.

[Super Dave]

Damn.
I can understand your position, and I will miss the site.

Thanks for taking the effort to have it up there for us in the first place.

I'll echo that too.

Thanks for what you did.

And I wish you tons of success in the next step of your life!!!!

[Gixxerblade]

Thanks for everything you did Russ. You provided a valuable resource for tracking and comparing out times.

[RoyHefner]

The time, effort, and money that you've put into the site has been much appreciated, and your decision to discontinue is also very understandable.  Thanks much and best wishes!

[grasslander]

Damn.
I can understand your position, and I will miss the site.

Thanks for taking the effort to have it up there for us in the first place.

Thanks as well!  Good Luck moving ahead...

[Andi]

CCS not returning emails or phone calls? I've never heard of such a thing! Thanks for all you did. I alway enjoyed looking at the times.

[Cowboy 6]

Stay in touch Russel!

[roadracer162]

Thanks Russ for all you have done.

[vnvbandit]

Thanks! Good on you for all the work you did!

[JOHN 3:16]

   Thanks Russ for the all the hard work you did. 

[Fast Eddy]

Thank you for all you have done.

Good luck

[bodie1331]

It's very unfortunate that such a good resource will no longer be available. Thank you for all your work on keeping the times available as long as you did. Best wishes

[Dieselboy]

Appreciate the effort, sad to see it went unappreciated for so long. Good luck with your future endeavors.

[alexm]

Russell - thanks for all your hard work on this.

If hosting is a burden, I have access to a few hosting resources in case you're interested. Check your PM.

[Russell2566]

I'm currently hosting on a HostMySite.com private VPN. It's possible a cheaper shared hosting solution might work. I need either a ColdFusion, BlueDragon or Railo server to run the application with a SQL Server backend.

[steve p]

CCS is so far behind the times I doubt they will ever catch up.  Thank you for all your hard work and your efforts to keep it going over the past few years, it is greatly appreciated.  Someday, CCS may actually step up and be a professional organization.

[Russell2566]

Business is business, but I can't believe that after a few years and TONS of MY money and time that CCS doesn't even have the basic decency to call me back and talk...

[antirich]

Just sent a PM.

[Cowboy 6]

I need either a ColdFusion, BlueDragon or Railo server to run the application with a SQL Server backend.

Yeah, what he said......

[alexm]

I'm currently hosting on a HostMySite.com private VPN. It's possible a cheaper shared hosting solution might work. I need either a ColdFusion, BlueDragon or Railo server to run the application with a SQL Server backend.

I have access to a shared VM with SQL Server available, but I don't have CF server or BlueDragon licenses, although Railo looks to be oss.

[Peter998]

Russell,
Thank you for all your hard work. I used it as a resource and found it very informative.

[nj01_6]

Russell,

Sent you a PM.

[firefightergarcia]

Great job on keeping that site going. I will truly miss the  "i ran such and such" and then thinking Bull*hit let me go check my bio, hah damn liar....lol

[CounterSteerer]

Russell Thank You Very Much. It was much appreciated.

[EnvyCycles]

Russell how much do you need to keep the site going? Maybe we can help out?????

[Russell2566]

Due to the DB Size and nature of the plans it ends up being around 160+ a month for ColdFusion hosting. Hosting plans for medium size sites has gone up, while the plans of hosting very large sites has gone down. You could make a few changes and make the code Railo or BlueDragon compliant, but the DB is MSSQL and converting to MySQL might not be worth the trouble.

Personally I say screw CCS. Kevin Elliot didn't even have the common decency to get back to me and have a conversation after I provided a free service to the group for almost 3 years. He had no problems sending me results and leveraging my hard work, but couldn't man up and even respond to an email.

50/50 chance I'll be putting up with the headaches instead at WERA when I have more time to race again.

I will be putting out the source code on to someplace like Google code or another open source SVN tool in the near future to give everyone access. The current DB Backup is a little over 250 megs.

[ChitownNexus]

What kind of file does CCS send out?

Is that the only way to receive a digital copy of the results?  Just wondering if there is another method to post everything online.  I have use/access to a server that we use to host other client sites.

[catman]

Seems like a noble endeavour, good luck

[ChitownNexus]

Seems like a noble endeavour, good luck

I've been talking with my business partner and programming this would not be a big issue.  We just need to see a sample dataset or whatever the timing system exports so we can test our application. 

I'm going to contact CCS this week and see if I can download a file to test. 

[twilkinson3]

HOller if you need any programming help nexus - I've got some free time over the winter 8-)

[ChitownNexus]

HOller if you need any programming help nexus - I've got some free time over the winter 8-)

Thanks for the offer.

At this point it looks like we won't be doing anything.  I called the CCS office and was told they are working on a website to do all the functionality.  Hard to believe when their main site is still static HTML :P

[Toy Store]

This may a little late, but we have server space and could offer it-up for a worthy cause...

[ChitownNexus]

We spoke about it today and might still put something together after we close a few other projects.  I have a sample CSV file from a BHF GTO race.  CCS has stated they are more than happy to send the results to us, but at this point not interested in funding/sponsoring or otherwise assisting in the development.  Not a big deal.

I realize most racers don't want to spend money, but if we built a site similar to the previous version with maybe a few other added features would a subscription of $20-25 per year be acceptable?