The big news, for those who are not yet aware, is of course the website outage. CC inspire, who hosts our website, was hit by a ransomware attack in January that disabled all of their servers and all of their backup systems. Acting under the advice of the FBI and DHS, CC inspire elected not to pay the very large ransom and struggled to recover what they could. Understandably, they gave priority in the recovery process to their paying customers, resulting in a nearly three month outage for our website. Fortunately NHOGA maintains multiple up-to-date backups independent of CC inspire so there was no loss of data for our organization.
CC inspire requested that we revert the domain name of our site from www.nhoga.com to its previous value of www.nhoga.org. In my opinion this was a desirable change that reflects NHOGA's status as a non-profit. Unfortunately this required registering a new Google Maps account since our old account was restricted to the www.nhoga.com domain. A new account is now in place and works in either the www.nhoga.org or the www.nhoga.com domains. However the work to convert all of our maps to the new account resulted in a nearly two week delay in getting the site fully functional.
But they say every cloud has a silver lining. Having to convert all of our site maps (approx.4,400 map pages) to our new Google Maps account provided an opportunity to upgrade our map technology. This was desirable because the majority of our existing map pages had a systematic error of approximately 80 meters in the location, resulting from incorrectly calculating the GPS coordinates from the NHOGA coordinates. The old map pages have all been retired and replaced with a single template map page. This step significantly reduces the work required to maintain the maps. A handful of the old map pages contained additional information about the graveyard. This information has either been moved to the corresponding main listing page, or if the volume of information was large, to a separate more info page with a link.
The links in the town-by-town listings have been converted to the template system. A second benefit of having to convert the links was that the long-term relational database reconstruction project, discussed in the Spring 2022 report, needed to be advanced to the point where it could be useful in the conversion. While considerable work still needs to be done, this project is now significantly closer to completion.
One additional benefit: ownership of the nhoga.com domain name has been transfered to Google Domains and is now under NHOGA ownership. Some time ago I established a Google Developers Account on NHOGA's behalf. Ownership of most of our digital assets have been transferred to this account and the remainder will be in the near future. John Lord has agreed to act as my backup for this account.
As was also discussed in last year's report, the relational database software platform needs to be upgraded. I have selected SQLite as the new platform. This relational database software is the most widely used database in the world and is used internally in virtually all cell phones. Most of the database platforms I researched far exceeded NHOGA's needs. SQLite, as the name implies, is a compact light weight system that is more appropriate for our use. Physical conversion of our data from Microsoft Access to SQLite is now underway.
Your webmaster enrolled in a course in digital map making at UNH Durham during the 2022 fall semester. This course consisted primarily of instruction on how to use the ArcGIS software suite to produce digital maps and presentations incorporating those maps. While the ArcGIS suite may not have much direct application for our website, the course provided a thorough background in obtaining and manipulated geographic datasets. In particular, I obtained new boundary data for all the cities and towns in NH from the US Census Bureau that are much superior to the boundary data previously obtained from Open Street Map. The new datasets are now used in all website maps.
Much of the final grade for the course was based on a class project of our own choosing. I elected to do a project that used a subset of data from the NHOGA website. This information was used to produce a variety of maps showing the distribution of burial patterns across the state, migration patterns that can be inferred from cemetery names and how the two patterns are related.
Clark Bagnall
Webmaster
