History

History of the unofficial SMAHS Alumni Site

Some of you might be wondering why I wanted to create a web site devoted to SMAHS alumni.

First, by way of introduction, I am Sam Cancilla, SMAHS class of 1978. I live in Albuquerque, New Mexico and work as a computer geek at a nuclear weapons laboratory.

While attending my SMAHS 20th reunion (yikes!) in 1998 I collected as many email addresses as I could and maintained a static HTML page with those addresses for the class. Maintaining a static webpage is somewhat tedious and put me in charge of making sure the info was up to date, something I could not do very easily. The answer was really a database-driven website where alumni from my class could maintain their own records.

In looking around the web for such a site I came across the national alumni registration sites such as Classmates.com but was thoroughly frustrated with their approach. Get people to register and taunt them with the names of their classmates but force them to pay a fee if they actually wanted to contact any of them.

I believed that I could do better and in early 2001 I came across the West Springfield High School Alumni Page, quite by accident. I liked the approach of the page and contacted it's creator asking if I could basically steal his idea and page design. Granted permission, I set about the task of cloning that site in February, 2001.

In May, 2002, well over a year later, I finally released to the public the site as you see it. Behind the scenes is a MySQL database which holds the alumni data and a single CGI program written in Perl that produces all the screens.

Now the trick is to get the word out to all the SMAHS alumni to sign up. Any help would be appreciated. Please contact me with any suggestions for the site. Sam Cancilla

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Site created and maintained by Sam Cancilla, sam@samstoybox.com, SMAHS class of '78 and hosted on his vintage toy site: Sam's Toybox - The Coolest Toys Ever Made.