The National Day of Prayer Task Force's 2005 website

White House press releaseIn late 2004, my internet startup CityStar® had the honor of designing, engineering and hosting the National Day of Prayer Task Force's 2005 website. The organization, operated out of Focus On The Family's headquarters in Colorado Springs and chaired by Shirley Dobson, had experienced significant website down time in previous years, and so our focus was on reliability.

With that in mind, I ordered construction of a cluster of dual-processor Xenon rack servers and a controller to share the request load among all machines, solving the reliability problem. Under my command, the site was never offline, even for a minute, in spite of a hard drive crash on the database server. That particular machine had dual hard drives which continuously backed each other up, but I had a long night when one of the hot-swappable drives failed.

Ricky Romero was our CIO and senior web developer at that time, and he designed and coded the striking home page shown above. I had never seen CSS used in such a clever way before. Ricky's design was immortalized by the Wayback Machine at Archive.org, and the site got great reviews, including a nice critique by President George W. Bush.

According to Wikipedia, "the National Day of Prayer is an annual day of observance held on the first Thursday of May, designated by the United States Congress, when people are asked to turn to God in prayer and meditation." The law was enacted in 1952, during the waning days of the Truman administration.
 


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