The good thing was that the alumni of HUST, the Huazhong (Central China) University of Science and Technolog , lack no talants. Upon the email call in May 1995 on HUAAN email network, several people set up their own sites for HUAAN: including the site at New York by Dr. XXX, and the one by Yidao Cai at http://www.neurophys.wisc.edu/~cai/hust/. The Wisconsin site was created on May 19, 1995, and it included some HUAAN documents and pictures of HUST from Dr. Cai's personal collection. In September, this site was appointed as the official HUAAN site.

One major function of our web site is the easy access of the alumni information. When HUAAN was established, the information was sent by email and stored in its raw form. When the alumni information was added on the web site in September 1995, Dr. Cai wrote two small programs to reformat the information so that it looks nicer on the web page. One of the program was CNLIST, and it now turns into a powerful tool for managing the alumni information and automatically generating/updating the ~100 web pages every week. The other program, CKMAIL, serves as a link between the system email program and CNLIST. This program also generate some automatic reply messages so that to reduce the burden on the list maintainer.

Before the end of 1995, web pages for fill information on line and search request were added. But due to system constraints, the requests were sent by email and then processed by CKMAIL and CNLIST. Earlier (or about the same time, could not recall), Dr. HU Xiangan wrote a CGI script to process the online-filled information. Although Dr. Hu's script was not used due to system constraints at the Wisconsin site, his effort was greatly appreciated and was very helpful in the later developments.

The Wisconsin site was running a VAX/VMS system. Due to the strong security protection, it was difficult to implement some automatic web CGI features as an ordinary user, for example, the online processing of alumni information. Also, as the more people are surfing the net, the site became busy. At this time, Dr. YANG Qing at the University of Rhode Island (URI) offered to set up another site: http://www.ele.uri.edu/hust/. With the talant of both HU Yiming and Yang Qing, the new site was set up in May 1996, and this site looks more colorful and included automatic features that were lacking at the Wisconsin site. As a result, we made the new URI site our regular site and the Wisconsin the backup site in Mid-June, 1996.

A second backup site, the Boys Town site, was added in March 1997. This site is purely experimental and for fun. On this site, Dr. Cai tests all the online, real-time prcessing functions and learn to set up a web server and other system managements. The machine was an office PC, a Pentium 133 running linux (a free unix). As Dr. Cai has to do some work with the PC under DOS/Windows to make a living, this site may be closed daytime weekdays. However, it was running about 70% of daytime weekdays in the last two months. While it is unlikely for the machine to be shutdown when you are in the middle of something, if that do occur, please accept this apology in advance. This site is not accessible now due to installation of firewall at BTNRH.

To complement the functionality of the Wisconsin site, real-time processing ability was added through links from the pages at Wisconsin site to a PC machine running Linux with dynamic IP address.

In July 1999, Dr. Cai wrote some Perl CGI scripts to built up an Alumni Forum, a place that people can freely post news or information about HUST and alumni. This forum was formally opened in November of 1999. As with the real-time capability of the alumni information processing, the posting functionality of the alumni forum can only be reached through links in the web pages at Wisconsin site.

The alumni information at different site were updated weekly (regular site) or biweekly (backup sites). So it may take upto two weeks for your information to be updated on all sites.

It you would like to setup a mirror/backup site, please contact us. We'll offer technical help as much as we can.

HUST Foundation Site

In spring 2002, Drs. FU Tianxiong and Cai discussed finding a permanent home to host the alumni site, perhaps using our own domain name. Two events happened during summer of 2002 gave this idea a final push. One is the moving of Wisconsin site to a MS IIS server, which prevents convenient update at that site, and the other was pending closure of connections for the real-time processing of alumni information, which was running from a desktop. It became clear that we must move fast. Dr. CHEN Yu registered hustfoundation.org and found a hosting company after careful search, and paid the hosting fee from his own pocket. Dr. Cai then converted the C programs that process alumni information into Perl. It took longer time than we had expected, but it worths the effort, as the new code is more secure and without losing any functionality. Dr. Cai also wrote some additional scripts to do remote system administration. By early Novembver, the new site http://www.hustfoundation.org/ is fully operational.

The arrival of hust.org

Michael Luo and Tom Gong registered hust.org around 1997 and they offered to host the alumni web site, which did not happen at that time. In July 2003, Yidao Cai finally got into contact with Michael again and shared with him about the idea of a website site for HUST alumni organizations (see here for details). Thanks to Michael Luo and Tom Gong for their generosity on the hust.org domain http://www.hust.org/ was working early September 2003.

During 2004 and 2005, Dr. Cai did a series of security updates to the alumni directory and forum programs, after several incidents of abuse of our alumni forum. In the mean time, functional enhanced were also made to the programs.

The financing status of hust.org

Commencial web hosting costs money. Although it is only slightly over $100 (about $100 hosting fee plus domain registration fee), it is not a good idea to let individuals paying for it over a long period of time. We originally had an idea for alumni organizations using the site to share the cost (Houston, Southern California and Michigan were committed), and Dr. Yu Chen paid the all fees for the first year (2002-2003) and continue paying domain registration for hustfounation.org. The domain registration fee for hust.org has been paid for by Michael Luo through 2006. Over time, Yidao Cai found a better way to finance the site, through advertising. He chose amazon.com in Feburary 2004. A lot of alumni are already buying things from Amazon, if you start from our alumni site, you pay the same price, but Amazon gives 5% back to hust.org, which was deposited into the account of HUSTAA (Houston alumni). The program was quite successful, we generated about $75, and Dr. Cai was able to reimburse the cost he paid for the second year (2003-2004) hosting. However, in 2005 so far we only generated about $10. The bright side is that in 2005 we have two advertisers each paid $20 for a space on our main index page: http://www.valuemyhouse.com/ (House Values) and http://www.homeworthhousevaluesource.com/ (Home Value). Please visit them so that they have the motivation to renew their ads.

The current hosting is paid for through July 2006 by Dr. Cai and he is pretty confident that we will eventually achieve the goal of "let the web site pay itself", of course with the help from you, our alumni.