As a member of Al Doran’s Mailing List and daily reader of his Escribe archive, I was sorry to hear of the continuing problem in trying to restore service. [See Note from Al in story below] Al did a remarkable job at the ISC Word tournament, getting scores, boxes, play-by-play and more posted promptly to the ISC website, www.iscfastpitch.com. However, I think we all missed our daily dose from Al in the old familiar Escribe format for the mailing list archive. It was especially unfortunate that the crash took place during the ISC World Tournament.

Fastpitchwest.com has provided a temporary home for Al’s archives, and will continue to do so as long as necessary. We ask only that you bear with the fact that our archive page is a bit less user friendly than the old Escribe page. As Al noted:

“For now we are not calling it the TEMP site, its our only site at the moment.”

The biggest complaint about the archive page that we are hosting is that the newest items are at the bottom instead of the top of the page, requiring readers to scroll to the bottom to see the latest news. I have the same complaint myself. Unfortunately, the software that we use at present to generate the archive page for Al’s does not permit me to change that format. (Control-End keys together will take you quickly to the bottom of the page on most browsers)

While Al looks at his options, we are researching software that would archive the emails in a format similar to Escribe. In the meantime, we have shortend the URL to eliminate the “.htm” at the end, to simplify things, to just:

http://www.fastpitchwest.com/alsfastball

Please pass this web address/URL along to your friends so they can find Al’s Archive. You can bookmark it by clicking the link and then Control D.

—
Jim Flanagan
Editor, Fastpitchwest.com
Co-editor, “The Deuce” Blog

We pass along the following note from Al Doran regarding the recent problems the Escribe site that had been hosting his mailing list:

eScribe is down and maybe out, maybe for good.

eScribe went down over a week ago, just as the ISC’s were getting underway. This is not the first time they have crashed and been down for more than a few hours. In June 2004 they went down and were down for weeks while the owner bought and set up all new servers.

eScribe is privately owned, my company has nothing to do with it. Al’s Fastball is just one of hundreds of list servers that make use of the services provided by eScribe. This service has always been free.

Last year in June we learned that the owner, Scott Paterson, was working with a couple of unpaid volunteers to keep eScribe going. He had to buy expensive computer equipment to replace the servers that had worn out and died.

This week we learned that they major technical problems and the prognosis is not good.

See Scott’s note to me today:

Al

Dead power supply and lack of financial support and non-paid volunteers. Going to try to fix it myself as soon as I have time, but really, with no end-user financial support, it’s most likely done for.
-Scott

This does not sound good.
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