About This Site

"FLAME" stands for "Former Loyal AMD Employee"

The FLAME website was created in 1997 by John McKean, an AMD FAE from Toronto, as a way for former and current AMDers to stay connected. After compiling the suggestions that were sent to him each week, and adding his own commentary, in italics, signed/jm. He published the FLAME newsletter to readers around the world for 17 years.

John passed away suddenly in September, 2014. John will be remembered by many for his contributions to AMD as an integral part of the Toronto field sales office from 1981-1996.

Read our tribute to John here.

How it Works/Worked

The site is written in PHP, beginning with some very simple pages written by John McKean back when everyone knew "PHP" stood for "PrettyGood Home Page". When John passed away, John Springer took it over, and, as is his wont, vastly overcomplicated it. Bits of code were added as new features were desired, and as John dug deeper into "Learning PHP". The code gradually evolved from simple php lines to classes and methods, interspersed with incredibly long strands of spaghetti, which remain to this day.

The member list changed from a simple text file to a sql database with passwords and all the member's profile information and activity logs.

Newsletter updates evolved from occasional emailing with bcc to automated weekly mailings, with dozens of variable insertions, periodic are-you-still-there checks, and personalized emails to each member.

Newsletters gradually shifted from simple html/php pages into pages generated automatically from articles and data in a sql content management system.

A "voting" system was added for up or down votes on articles, and votes and read-counts were reported in each week's newsletters.

Assets went from gifs and jpegs saved in the newsletter directory to a full-on asset system, where item data - title, type, contributor, date, caption, location - was in an sql database, items themselves were on a amazon s3 server, and references to items in the newletter could automatically pull the thumbnail, caption, credit, and link to the original. The assets could be youtube videos also, and it would pull the youtube-generated thumbnail for the video.

Stats

In 2022, the site had 2,591 members, and 3,880 items in the asset list. There were 1,010 newsletters published.

In 1998 the site was hosted on bigbluespruce.ca, a Canadian web company, long gone now. A lot of material was stored on Rick Marz' marz-net. Everything was transferred to Pair.com in Philadelphia in 2015. The domain "AMDFlames.org" was transferred to AMD in 2022. Flames is now a subdomain of John's digitalmx.com domain.

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JS -- Your former temporary editor. It was great fun.

1970	2022