AboutThisSystem

About The Halifax Rainbow Encyclopedia

A page for every person, place, thing, and event of particular relevance to the Q community in Halifax, ever.

This is a free, user driven website in Wiki format, which means that you, as a member of the community can contribute. If you'd like to get involved, check out TipsForContributors.

The most common uses for the Encyclopedia are listed on the FrontPage.

Here's the table of contents of all the pages in the Encyclopedia -- warning, quite long.

pic2015-2023 Active Users Per Month

Chronology

2000-2009

November 21, 2001
Dan posted to ns.general,hfx.general,can.motss: "There's a new and innovative Halifax web page on line. http://welcome.to/gayHalifax is a place for information, opinions and entertainment relevant to the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transsexual, transgendered and friends community.
"I set the page up in about ten minutes, and wanted to make it as current as possible," said Mike Godfrey, host and occasional editor of the web site. "The site is as current as its viewers want, and has whatever content they like, because they're the ones writing it."
system was brought online by MikeGodfrey as welcome.to/GayHalifax using the Ward Cunningham HyperPerl wiki - the very first wiki software ever released.
March, 2002
DragQueens project started by DanielMacKay as a way to relieve boredom at drag shows.
December, 2002
has about 700 pages on line, covering many aspects of Halifax life.
December 4, 2003
DanielMacKay brings a backup system on line with almost 900 pages.
April 20, 2004
One Thousand Pages!
2004 midyear
sysadmin MikeGodfrey gets threatened with legal action by EmeraldGibson about content pertaining to her on the website. Sysadmin duties are handed off to DanielMacKay.
October, 2004
LocalEvents gets edited for the one thousandth time and the URL changes to https://gay.hfxns.org/
April, 2005
over 1200 pages on line
August, 2005
Major cleanup: about two hundred pages not related to queer life in Halifax MarkedForDeletion
February 13, 2006
system converted to the OddMuse "engine" with a few OddmuseChanges
March, 2006
pages MarkedForDeletion in August are actually deleted
May 11, 2006
Encyclopedia overrun by spam. QuestionAsker "captcha" system installed.
June 1, 2006
"Triangle Background" look & feel designed by Radomir Dopieralski. Comments on the new design are here.
June, 2008
1400 pages on line.
March, 2009
1600 pages

2010-2019

August 23, 2010
System moved from 15-year-old Sun E220R to an AMD 3800 X2 with approximately 15x the performance and 1/5 the power consumption.
November 25, 2010
1467 pages + 632 day pages on line.
December 6, 2011
Happy 10th Anniversary! 1568 pages + 291 day pages on line! 62 pages marked HistoryProjectTodoList.
April 27, 2012 14:00 - 15:00
System was unavailable while being moved to a new location. Formatting of pages and an error message were displayed until about 18:00
May 7, 2012 09:00 - 11:00
System was unavailable for network rewiring
June, 2013
Switched operating system from Solaris to Debian Linux
June 26, 2014
Upgraded the database to Oddmuse 2.3. 1665 + 351 day pages on line.
2015-ish
Begin referring to the site informally as "Halifax Rainbow Encyclopedia"
December 6, 2016
Happy 15th Anniversary! 1659 non-day page articles on line; 517,000 words (including day pages.)
2018
The GlitterBeanCafe uses pages from the Encyclopedia in its queer history wall.
May 15, 2019
1738 pages, 525,000 words on line.

2020-2029

January 30, 2020
System moved from Debian 7.11 to 9.11. 1780 pages.
February 10, 2020
Changed the SiteName to "Halifax Rainbow Encyclopedia"
February 27, 2020
Logo (at the top of every page) updated after 20 years to JessicaRoweJerome?'s "rainbow books" design
March 12, 2020
Server moved to a kimsufi KS-1 server, an Atom D425 - 2GB DDR3 1066 MHz - 500GB SATA at the RBX5 data centre in Roubaix, France.
March 18, 2020
https / ssl enabled on site
May 13, 2020
all http:// links switched to https:// (almost entirely photos)
May 17, 2020
outage: apache2 SIGTERM 18:29 -19:17
May 17, 2020
outage: apache2 SIGTERM 00:19 - 06:32
March, 2021
GI Joe's in Montréal upset about SaunaGIJoe which due to being very badly written and out of date, was not clear that it was historical. Dan worked with them for a week to fix up the page, make sure that anyone who found it would understand that it was 1) historical and 2) got a link to the current one. With a very happy ending - ask Dan.
November 21, 2021
Happy 20th Birthday! Wayves article here 1922 non-day pages.
January 1, 2022
We have over six hundred thousand words in two thousand finished pages, works-in-progress, or article stubs, and about thirty five hundred images and very roughly a hundred hours of indexed audio and video recordings.
March 1, 2022
Misinformation posted to MannaForHealth. Backed out by request April 7, 2022.
January 13, 2023 06:00h
2 minute outage, server rebooted after a mysterious out of memory condition yesterday
January 19, 2023 10:00h
3 hour outage during Debian 9 --> 11 upgrade
Halifax Pride Page 2023
Halifax Pride Page 2023
2023 Summer
LocalEvents becomes the only Pride calendar for the city; Halifax Pride eventually changed their Calendar page to point to it, and thanked us.
June 22, 2023
Google Analytics says we had 10,328 hits in the last 30 days.
July, 2023
Virgin Radio & Move 100 create radio spots in trade for using the Events Calendar. There were two versions: 12 seconds and 26 seconds, both mp3. (and identical ones that said "Virgin")
July 21, 2023
The Halifax Pride Society declares LocalEvents as the main Pride calendar for the year.
August 1, 2023
130,000 hits in the last month, mostly on LocalEvents
September, 2023
Savvas Learning, a K12 book publisher requests to use a chunk of PinkTriangleDay for its program, Interlink Canadian Turning Points published in December, 2023. Program Description: Interlink Grade 11 is an educational series composed of 4 student books, 1 teacher guide, and 10 case studies. The series supports the Nova Scotia Grade 11 Social Studies curriculum and is available in both English and French. The content in the series focuses on Mi’kmaw and other Indigenous cultures in Canada, inequities in Canadian society, Black Nova Scotians, Canadian responses to environmental justice issues, as well as other subject matter that is of importance in the education of Grade 11 students in Nova Scotia. Format: Print and Electronic; Quantity: 100,000 end users; Territory: Canada; Duration: 10 Years; Language: English and French; Accessibility: Yes; Promotional Use: Promotional Use: In context of a Savvas educational product
September 22, 2023
Word count: 785,661 (includes Day Pages.)
November 2, 2023
Wiki engine Oddmuse upgraded from 2.3.15 to 2.4.2 and a required minor tweak to the CSS. There were no functional changes.
April 10, 2024 18:45h
4.5 minute outage for a reboot after system patches

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