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Site Name
Cemetech
Site URL
Founders
Christopher Mitchell
Founding Date
Sometime in 2000
Years Active
2000 to Present
Aliases
CTech
Tagline
Leading The Way To The Future (2000-2015)
Make Cool Things, Teach Cool Stuff (2015-Present)
Affiliations
TI-Freakware
Riverye Studios
The BASIC Elite
StickFigure Graphic Productions
Site Genre
Programming
Archives
Forum
News
Cemetech is a jack-of-all-trades TI community site. It not only has one of the most active TI forum to allow community discussion and participation, but it also has program archives, hosts programming contests, and is involved in various projects for the TI graphing calculators. Christopher Mitchell (Kerm Martian), the site founder, is involved in much of the sites' day-to-day activities.
Site Content
Site Staff
- Christopher Mitchell (Kerm Martian) — founder
- Daniel Thorneycroft ( TIFreak8x)
- Thomas Dickerson (Elfprince13)
- Shaun Mcfall (Merthsoft)
- Jon Sturm (TheStorm)
- Theodore Davis (Rivereye) — retired
- Jonathan Pezzino (JPez) — retired
Site Significance
Cemetech has created various innovative products for the TI community, in terms of both hardware for the computer and web applications for the Internet. In particular, they are responsible for CALCnet, a networking protocol that allows you to easily connect two TI graphing calculators, as well as SourceCoder, an online IDE for TI-Basic programming for the TI-83/84/+/SE/CSE/CE calculators. Doors CS 7 also had a big influence among TI users, who previously almost unanimously adopted MirageOS as their favorite shell: A lot have made the switch to DCS7. Cemetech is also involved a lot in Casio PRIZM programming.
From 2006 to 2009, the site promoted free speech and became more lax in moderation, which allowed more room for harsh criticism and getting new members to learn the hard way, kind of. This resulted in some backlashes between some Cemetech and Omnimaga users over the years, as the latter site both promoted a friendly community environment and had a campaign to get every site to take the same stance against hostility running at the time. In late 2009, however, moderation became less tolerant towards harsh criticism directed at new members. The site leader, along with several other members also voiced their opinion against practices by Texas Instruments against 3rd-party coders with the TI-Nspire platform and they are heavily in favor of the Casio PRIZM over the TI-Nspire.
Site Milestones
In 2006, Cemetech was the most active of all TI calculator forums at the time. However, it fell behind after an hosting incident in late 2007. In January 2010, it finally reached 100,000 posts, then activity rebounded the next summer, en route for a record high monthly post count of 6,550 in September 2010. It has reached 200,000 posts in November 2012 and despite competition from smarphones, Cemetech is still going strong today.
Site URLs
The Cemetech site has had various URLs over the years, from originally having a third-level domain name with hosting through Homestead in 2000 to finally settling at its current location with a custom domain name in 2005.
- http://www.cemetech.net
- http://cemetech.homestead.com
- http://www.geocities.com/kerm_martian
- http://www.geocities.com/kermmartian
- http://www.cemetech.tk — redirect site
- http://cemetech.designerz-core.com
Site History
(Taken from Cemetech about page)
Cemetech was started in 2000 by Kerm Martian as a prototype group to develop his inventions; it was briefly named CTech before the name Cemetech was chosen. In late 2000 Kerm began to program on Texas Instruments' graphing calculators. This site was originally hosted at http://cemetech.homestead.com. In late 2002 it moved to http://www.geocities.com/kerm_martian, reachable through the redirect site http://www.cemetech.tk. After the site was accidentally deleted, it was recreated at http://www.geocities.com/kermmartian, still reachable through http://www.cemetech.tk. In July of 2004 a complex forum system was added via InvisionFree, with a member and username system; it was integrated into the Geocities site from here. In the fall of the same year, a new archive system written in Perl was deployed with statistics. Thanks to the efforts of member patl411, March 2005 saw Cemetech move to a better server at http://cemetech.designerz-core.com (no longer accessible). With CGI and PHP access, no ads, and more space and bandwidth than Cemetech previously boasted, this seemed to be the ideal host for Cemetech. The site could be found through the alias http://www.cemetech.tk, a link that has been updated to point to the current incarnation of Cemetech. When the site moved to Designerz-Core, the old Invisionfree forum was abandoned, so the forum was recreated with phpBB2.
In June of 2005, Cemetech purchased the domain http://www.cemetech.net, which is still the main domain for Cemetech. Designerz-Core became increasingly unstable and was eventually abandoned by its owner, so Cemetech followed suit in October of 2005, purchasing a $30/year hosting package from Jatol.com. Jatol providing ample features for Cemetech's rapidly growing needs, including additional databases, email addresses, scripting languages, and space/bandwidth. Jatol remained stable for close to two years, suddenly disappearing in September 2007 among suspicion that its owner either died of cancer or was forced to skip the country by debt. After a week of uncertainty whether data could be rescued, the site was resurrected on SurpassHosting, a host with a five-year positive track record, 200GB of space, and 2TB of monthly bandwidth. On May 30th, 2008, a new visual style was rolled out across Cemetech, and various tweaks were undertaken in the following two weeks to greatly improve functionality over the previous CemetechLite and Cemetech5. The culmination of about two years of work, Cemetech6 is an attempt to freshen Cemetech's look and make navigation more straightforward.
Between 2008 and 2010, Cemetech has continued to grow and improve. Activity on the forums is growing towards levels not seen since before Jatol disappeared, some of the graphing calculator focus is returning without loss of the other technology, hardware, and coding aspects, and several long-term Cemetech projects like Doors CS 7.0 and CALCnet are either being completed or returning to active development.