Feature Mustang Auction History Update

I just completed some updates to the 1992 and 1993 feature Mustang auction history pages. The request to add a search by sequence number was a feature that seemed too reasonable not to have. I too had experienced the need to look for auctions by this criteria while researching a car.

I also added some other things –

• Thumbnails for auction listings that are not on ebay anymore (>90 days old). I have been storing the main photo of every auction since mid 2005. For new auctions, I now generate thumbnail versions of each image to be used when the thumbnail is no longer in Ebay’s image cache. I also generated thumbnails for the historical auctions for which I have images.
• As part of the auction details, added the main photo for all auctions where it has been captured (again, back to mid 2005).
• Some database connection fixes that will hopefully result in even greater stability. The move to the new web host in July 2011 left behind most of the site stability problems. That change can be mostly attributed to the availability of more resources on the web server. The bug I just fixed just took longer to show itself on the new server but still caused an occasional crash. It was only in the code involved in adding auctions and was a problem with not releasing the database connection.

In handing these updates, I also improved the development environment that I use. I first developed the auction history in 2003 on a Windows 2000 desktop. My next machine was Windows XP where I had problem running natively the development tools that I needed to use so I ended up creating a VMWare virtual machine from the old Windows 2000 desktop that I then used to do subsequent work through the years. Fast forward to my current Windows 7 machine and that old Windows 2000 virtual machine still runs but getting it networked was an issue.

So, to do this round of auction history changes, instead of spending the time to fix the networking issue, I invested time in getting to an updated development environment much closer to the production triplewhitefox.com site. I am now using the BitNami Tomcat stack. I went with the one that configures Tomcat 6.0.35-0 running on Ubuntu 10.10. Instead of using VMWare I have switched to Virtual Box to run this on my Windows 7 host machine.

Using a pre-built VM made this pretty easy to get running. My next step, of course, will need to be to get PHP running on the VM in order to fully simulate the TWF site.

Link: 1992 Auction Results
Link: 1993 Auction Results