Well, after the site being down for a couple of days, it's back online again.  The trouble with running an experiment like this website, is you get in over your head such that, when something breaks, you don't know how to fix it!  When the sessions table crashed and I couldn't repair, it took me a couple days to figure it out--in between long stints of having to do "real work".The journey continues...

After creating a first instance of CraterAlumni.com using CivicSpace 0.8.2 (based on Drupal), I moved that instance aside and started over with CS 0.8.3.  For those of you not familiar with CivicSpace or Drupal, Drupal is an open source content management systems, sometimes also referred to as opensource CMS. 

Open source means that all of the technology behind this thing is freely available to anyone daring (or gullible) enough to try it out.  In this case, this website fits into a category somtimes called "LAMP", which means that it runs on Lynux operating system, using the Apache webserver, MySQL database server and PHP website code.