news's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- excellent server news Okay, I have good news and then I have gooder news: The small issue from earlier tonight is fixed, and all the servers are up again. Also, the big issue from the last few weeks is also fixed, and the one database server that was overloaded a lot, is actually working properly now, not only does it have double the RAM it had before (it had 4 gigs when it was set up, but a week into it, 2 gigs stopped working for some reason), it also has CPUs that are 33% faster than before. It's too early to make a definitive judgement, but it looks like that server is much, much less overloaded than it has been lately, and the "oops hold on!" messages that non-gold members have been seeing during peak hours may be greatly reduced. (my early, stronger optimisism on this topic was premature because one thing was broken that I didn't notice was preventing non-gold people from adding entries, and thus reducing the server load a lot, so i was all "woo, the server is totally super duper awesome tonight!", but yeah, now it looks like the performance gain is there, but not as drastic as I thought. Frustrating, but predictable with my luck hah!) By Andrew Smales. 6:42 p.m. - May. 20, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- yoinks Ugh, sorry for the database errors you may have seen for a few minutes just now, the server place disconected one of the database servers without phoning me first as they were supposed to, so I didn't have warning to move that database's load to another server. I've fixed it now though so the load is all going to one server, and they should have the one they're working on back online in 10 minutes (they say), with double the memory as it had before (assuming they figure out why it doesn't already have it working). I'll update this when that happens. By Andrew Smales. 5:49 p.m. - May. 20, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- updatey updatey Just a note, Sammy asked me to thank everyone who gav to the sammy birthday fund, you're all awesome! Sammy was excited and a bit embarassed to find out about it, and I think pretty happy over the nice notes some people added. So yay everyone, yay sammy, god bless us everyone! Also if you put your username in the thing, I've added your banners now. On another note, I (Andrew) personally am super super excited today because I think I may have made a breakthrough on the server overloaded-ness issue. if you remember, when the new servers were set up, they worked awesomely for a week or so, and then started getting busy pretty fast and I made an analogy to a glass of water that magically is always full or something.. I thought that the site had just gotten a lot busier, and actually it had, which sort of confused things, but it looks like there might be an issue with some of the memory on one of the database servers that is causing this. I'm waiting on a tech guy to physically look at the server in question and see what's up, but it might not be the disk I/O after all, it could just be half the memory not working right after I rebooted the server right around the time it started getting overloaded again. So the "server too busy for a minute!" errors may be greatly reduced sooner than I even thought! By Andrew Smales. 10:14 p.m. - May. 15, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- secret birthday fund for Sammy Okay, this is a secret from Sammy until tomorrow morning, so please don't mention about in any support requests until then (I think Sammy is gone till tomorrow morning anyhow, but just in case) but it was Sammy's birthday last week and I am starting a surprise Sammy birthday gift fund. I meant to do it last week but I sort of waffled on it, which is dumb, because Sammy rules and does so much. So, if you've ever gotten some tech support or html help or whatnot from Sammy, and you want to donate a few bucks (however much you want to donate is up to you, but 5 or 10 dollars would be excellent.. and also this could backfire if just a few people give 50 cents each or something haha! "Hey Sammy, here's 2 bucks!"), please do! I can't afford to pay Sammy much but Sammy does an awesome job (if you have any slow replies ever it's because it's a question I have to do, Sammy is the quick one) and I think it'd be great if I could surprise Sammy tomorrow morning with a birthday gift (ie. the donated money) from Diaryland users. Sammy Sammy Sammy! Sammy is the best, so anyhow if you're a Sammy fan, you can show your love with this here button (that goes to the Diaryland paypal account, but if you add a message, Sammy will see it).
By Andrew Smales. 8:32 p.m. - May 13, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- an update! Long time no news! I can't believe I haven't updated this in a month, yoinks! Sometimes when I'm busy doing other things I forget about the news a bit, which is dumb of me. Anyhow, the site has been humming along fine, but getting so so busy, especially sunday, monday and tuesday nights, and I'm working on getting some upgrades done this week, I think the disks are just getting too busy on one of the database servers and the I/O is really high, which is tricking me because the end result is high CPU usage (which is why you may see a "wait a few minutes before adding an entry" message if you're not a gold member at the times when it's extra busy), so I'm going to try to get more disks on that server and then spread the database between them. I have to test that on a non-live machine first though to make sure the setup goes okay and everything, so it'll be a few days, assuming the server place has disks on hand. I have actually known this and would have done this a bit earlier but frankly, the canadian/american exchange rate has gone kind of crazy lately, the canadian dollar is stronger than it used to be, which sort of screws the site up when we convert the american money coming in into canadian, so I couldn't add disks on the last billing period. Blah blah anyhow that's it, and I have to add another news item in a second! By Andrew Smales. 8:14 p.m. - May 13, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- quick stylesheet thing I meant to mention, I changed the default 404 error page for Diaryland today, and it may affect certain people's diaries who have errors in their html. Here is the skinny: If suddenly the diaryland members area background shows up in your diary, it's because you have a stylesheet link tage that points to a non-existent file. So go into your html, find a line like this: <link href="/something.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> and remove it, because you don't have a file named something.css in your web directory, and it will try to load the error page instead. This didn't matter with the old error page because it was a 302 redirect, but with the new correct error page, it does. If you are a gold member, you could also just change that line to say: <link href="images/something.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css"> and then if you actually have a something.css file, you can upload it to your images directory, and that'll work with the stylesheet file. I don't think this should affect any more than a few people, but I've already had 2 people write, so maybe more people have erroneous LINK tags than you'd think! By Andrew Smales. 5:07 p.m. - Apr. 15, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- short update, nothing exciting Hi all! Just a quick note to mention I made a small change in the members area, adding the "logged in as .." text you see there, as well as changing the links to your profile and diary (they still work like they used to, they just point to new special urls so that they work on certain areas of the members area they didn't used to, like the "most recently updated diaries" page). I've checked this out on a bunch of browsers and it seems to show up fine, but if you use a browser it looks weird on or anything, let me know! Also I should just mention as I do sometimes when I start getting a lot of emails, that the correct way to get tech support now is still the web-based system and there's a fair chance that if you email me the mails will not get noticed very quickly. The web system is also much faster than the old email system ever was, since Sammy handles most of those requests, and Sammy is fast and awesome! So yeah, just wanted to remind everyone of that, the "help section" link is on every page in the members area! By Andrew Smales. 3:33 p.m. - Apr. 15, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- water what now? Hi! Just a small update, the new servers are still holding up well. Last night was pretty crazy though, yesterday was a very very busy day, and there were a few minutes at night where the new database servers were a bit strained, but overall it was fine. It sort of seems like Diaryland is like a magical glass or something, where it gets full of water and is almost about to overflow, so I go "no problem, I'm replacing you with a bigger glass, so big that you won't fill with water for months and months" and then a week later the glass goes "sucker, i'm enchanted and look, I'm already almost full". That's the worstest, most terriblest analogy I could possibly come up with I guess, but it's weird, once the servers aren't overloaded anymore, they just explode with people using them more and more, and boom, they're busy again. And weirdly enough, as i was writing this, they just got really really busy for about 5 minutes and then eased off. So, the add an entry limits for non-gold members are really not something I anticipate having to add anytime soon again, but if this keeps up those might show up for like 5 or 10 minutes here and there on very busy nights. I really really don't want to do that though, and I doubt it'll happen soon, so no worries right now! I'm consulting with a super-duper sysadmin today too who can hopefully figure out if I have some problem with disk I/O that's causing load to jump up now and then or what, cause these temporary spikes are sort of weird! By Andrew Smales. 4:34 p.m. - Mar. 31, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- more space for supergold Just a quick note for supergold members, I just upped the amount of image hosting space you get on the supergold plan to 30 megs. It was 12 before, and I bumped it to 15 a month or so ago, but I was waiting till the new servers were up to raise it finally, and yeah, it's 30 MB now, so if you were at your limit, you have more room for images now (or .css or .js files, I keep meaning to point out that you can host those too). It's nice that the servers are fine now so I can actually get to all the stuff on my todo list! update: I forgot to mention and someone asked, if you are already a gold member, you can go to this page and it'll tell you how much it'd be for you to upgrade to supergold. It's $2 extra per month, rounded down to the nearest month, so if you have 2.5 months left for instance, it'd cost you $4 to get the extra space (plus the webmail, comments system, etc.). By Andrew Smales. 12:49 p.m. - Mar. 27, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- gold reminders Just a small note: If you renewed your gold membership in the past week or so but still got an email since then reminding you it was going to run out soon, don't worry, I just realized that I didn't disable the reminder program on the old server, so it's been looking at the old databases and going "hmm so and so runs out soon!" and emailing reminders still. Sorry about the scare for anyone who that affected! By Andrew Smales. 4:29 p.m. - Mar. 25, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- me like internet Okay, some good news finally! 2 of the 3 new database servers are up and running and have been handling the load quite nicely all weekend. This is great news, I wasn't sure if they'd be this good until I got the third one integrated and reconfigured them to use the extra RAM I got in them this weekend (they both have 4 gigs of ram now, the max they'll take. I almost got different servers with 4 CPUs that'd take I think 16 gigs of ram, and I sort of wish I had, but their bang for the buck wasn't as good as the ones I got), which I haven't had time to do yet. So right now, I don't anticipate any problems, but sunday and monday nights are the busiest nights for the site, so maybe with the added traffic tonight I might have to adjust things until the final adjustments are made, but so far so good, everything looks nice and stable, and the next thing on my to-do list is to configure the database software so it's making the absolute best use of the ram that it can. By Andrew Smales. 7:54 p.m. - Mar. 23, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- members area back Ugh, problems tonight: Everything seemed fine and dandy, and then one of the database daemons decided to die for some reason, and i wasn't in and the monitoring software I guess isn't working properly to page me. So, it's back now, I'll see what's up, and ugh. update: Okay, it seems that the server place rebooted the server in question, and the database software didn't come back up at startup. I am not sure why they rebooted it and I'm looking into that now, but it probably has to do with the extra memory they installed in it earlier, although that was done an hour before they rebooted it, odd. By Andrew Smales. 9:18 p.m. - Mar. 21, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- update again Still trying to figure out what's up with one of the new database servers, it's acting as if it's not as powerful as it should be, and it's the one that should be gliding along even more effortlessly than the other, not getting bogged down, because it has less stuff to do basically. I'll have this figured out soon I am sure. By Andrew Smales. 8:35 p.m. - Mar. 20, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- update Sorry, there are some wonky things going on with the new database servers, so I'm tracking down and fixing them as we speak. For a while, new entries wouldn't show up in the edit/delete entries screen, but this is fixed now. Everyone is trying to add entries, etc. all at once right now which is making it harder to track down, so I have shut down 2 sections of the site to non-gold members, which decreases the server load immensely and lets me actually see what's going on. Sorry about that, I should have the problem tracked down soon though I hope. By Andrew Smales. 5:38 p.m. - Mar. 20, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- server move finished Okay, the site is moved to the new server now, and the fact you are reading this means your DNS has updated and is seeing the new one. A few important notes: - If your diary does not show your most recent entry, don't worry, just make a change to your diary, like editing an entry for instance, and it'll fix itself. There is a program running on the server which is updating all the diaries that updated in the last week (since the first attempt to switch servers), but there are so many of them that it's taking a while. But don't worry, your entries are safe and in the database, it's just the actual html pages that need to update. - The new servers are running obviously, but there may be small problems here and then to begin with, so let me know if you notice anything odd using the web based support system (click the "help section" link in the members area). The performance on the new servers may not be at 100% yet, I still have to optimize the database servers a bit so they're using all their resources as well as they should. I'm off to do that now in fact! By Andrew Smales. 6:45 a.m. - Mar. 20, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- server move on the go Just a note that the server move is now in progress. You can still add entries, but not change your template, and soonish the adding entries will be shut down while I move that part of the database over. I am hoping for a 3-4 hour move, but I'll update the news should it be faster or slower, and of course when it's done. By Andrew Smales. 8:22 p.m. - Mar. 19, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- the old network crapped out for a bit.. Ugh. Okay, I will summarize tonight: Sucks. More specifically: I was going to move the site over from the old place to the new place. Just after starting to prepare, the old place's network went down (they say due to a spoof flood) for about 2 hours (actually it wasn't 100% down, the site still loaded, just very very slow), which not only sucked really badly, but has screwed up my schedule and now I have to move tomorrow night it looks like, unless I can get things back on track very fast. So I'm off to do that, and I'm very, very, VERY sorry about the downtime tonight, I know how frustrating it is. Exactly how frustrating. By Andrew Smales. 11:28 p.m. - Mar. 16, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- harassment update Okay, I have had a lot of flak lately about things I have been doing to reduce harassment on the site. As I have been mentioning for a couple of months now here, there has been a lot of harassment.. people spamming other people's guestbooks, notes page, creating diaries solely to harass people, etc. So let me spell out the rules for people who can't understand that clearly: - If you make fun of someone in your diary, that is fine. - If you make a diary solely to harass a certain person or group of people, you will be shut down (ie. creating someone-sucks.diaryland.com, etc.). - If you go out of your way to bother and annoy someone to the point where they shut down their diary and then you BRAG about this on your diary, that is harassment. Seriously, am I crazy to have to say that? I have had lengthy discussions with this about people lately who seem to think I am. Maybe they don't understand the facts, who knows, but seriously, anyone who thinks that is crazy, please email me and explain why I shouldn't shut down a diary that harasses people until they shut down their sites, and then brags about it. I have closed down a total of about 10 diaries for harassment, threats, etc. (probably less, I'm going to try and look up the exact number later) since starting the site (that's 10 in 4 years, out of 850,000), and I'm getting a bit sick lately of getting called a censor because I won't run a banner with nudity in the members area, or one that insults another member, etc. Sorry if I sound like I'm about at the end of my rope lately, but this is just driving me nuts. By Andrew Smales. 6:44 p.m. - Mar. 13, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- server Friiiiiiiiiig. I have had to abort the server move just now, after working on it for about 6 hours. The connection between the old server place and the new one just got really lousy about halfway in and everything just kept getting slower and slower till the point where I would have had to stay up and keep the site down for a long time at this rate, at least twice as long as I planned. Here is what I am going to do now though: Since I have a lot of the site on the new server, I am going to continue to move it over for the next day or two, and then just before I actually make the new servers go live, I will run a program to update everyone on the new server who has updated from this point on. The problem tonight was that I tried to move everything at once, which would have been fine if the speed hadn't gotten crappy. By doing this incrementally, it'll be a lot easier for me to move everything quickly in the middle of the night with very little downtime. I'm sorry about the extended downtime tonight while trying to move this, I still can't believe how the speeds just dropped, it's such a bummer, very very depressing. I will update the news when I decide on a new time, and I'm going to make sure to sleep all day before doing it, because doing it incrementally should be faster (except the part where I have to set up a system to do that first, which is why I chanced being able to do the all-at-once thing tonight, I'm as sick of the server problems as everyone, if not moreso), but just in case a bunch of things go wrong and I have to stay up the whole entire night, I'll be more ready. For the last 4 hours at least I have been about ready to keel over. So okay, again, sorry for the downtime, it won't happen again, and ugh, I hate the internet, I forget if I mentioned that. I anticipate some angry emails over this, which is fine, just keep in mind, this is not a matter of copying a few files between 2 machines, the site is massive, and complications like this are sort of unavoidable when doing a big move between 2 network facilities. The alternative would be for me to leave the site at the old colocation place and therefore continue to have network problems and slow response when I need them to do something, so if you're annoyed right now, that's totally cool, but just bear in mind that in the long (or not so lon) run, this delay will be worth it, the site will be much more reliable and robust. And if I have to wait till the weekend (but I'm hoping I don't) to complete the move, I will do that, because when I really assess the situation now, hurrying to move the site over completely tonight was probably the biggest mistake, but frankly, I'm sick of the wait and getting tired of people complaining about it, so I decided to do it all at once right away rather than spend an extra couple of days planning out an incremental strategy. By Andrew Smales. 3:55 a.m. - Mar. 13, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- server move Okay, this hopefully is the last update on the servers: This weekend they finally installed a new OS that supported the extra ethernet drivers, so I started setting up the servers with the Diaryland software, but realized partway into it that the new kernel wasn't set up to use both CPUs in the servers, so i had to wait for them to fix that. The servers finally were 100% seaworthy yesterday night, and I have been installing and testing the software since then, and unless something unforeseen comes up (and at this point I think every possible unforeseen circumstance in history has already come up, so we should be safe), I will be moving the site over to the new servers later, probably starting at sometime after midnight EST. I still have to do some tests before then to see how long the migration will take, but it may be a while, and while the migration is happening, diaries and profiles will be available, but most of the members area features will give you some form of "moving servers, hold on!" message. DiaryLand is very large now (the new servers have a combined total of 864 GB of storage, which is actually 576 usable GB since they're in RAID5), so moving all the files to the new servers is not going to be super-duper fast, but I am hoping the total time will be about 2-4 hours. update (3:30 am): okay, this is taking a bit longer than I expected due to a few small things I had to smooth out, and I'm postponing the full move till tomorrow so I don't fall asleep in the middle or start making stupid mistakes cause I'm tired. But pretty much there almost now. By Andrew Smales. 7:41 p.m. - Mar. 11, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- network update ARGH. The OLD server place is having network problems so the site was just inaccesible to a lot of people for 20 minutes or so. The NEW server place are behind schedule, we decided to reinstall a newer kernel so the second ethernet interface would be supported. Once the new server place has the friggging servers up, I will move everything over ASAP. Until then, if you are frustrated, just rest assured, I am 100000 times more, and I am doing everything in my power to get everything fixed, which unfortunately right now is mostly limited to very terse phone calls and emails to both places. update: I haven't heard the final word from the network place, but it seems to be up, they had some sort of DDOS attack going on, some hosts on their network were zombies in it it looks like. Anyhow blah blah, it looks like they have it fixed now, but I can't get through to them to confirm on the phone yet. Also, since I wrote this, the new place finally has the servers set up as they need to be, so I'll be spending the next day or so configuring them, testing a bit and them migrating the site over. By Andrew Smales. 4:25 p.m. - Mar. 07, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- server update Okay, the latest on the servers: They were ready yesterday and I could log into them, I started getting ready for the migration, etc., but then I noticed that the second ethernet interface on each of them wasn't set up. The server place tried to install them but apparently the kernel version they installed doesn't support some needed drivers, so they're having to switch to some new kernel or other drivers or something, but they're working on it as we speak (I have a shell open watching the admin guy do stuff right now). So, tonight, if you get the "server is too busy" message, try again a few minutes later, because I have altered it so that basically, there are no "peak hours" exactly (previously, I was watching the backend server myself to see when it was too busy, and shutting things off manually), but the template/addentry things watch the database server to see how busy it is, and if it happens to be bad right as you go to load a form, it tells you and you have to wait a few minutes. Anyhow, again, this is as frustrating for me as it is for you, much moreso I would bet, but as soon as the new servers are fully functional, I'll be migrating the site over ASAP. By Andrew Smales. 8:01 p.m. - Mar. 06, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- servers almost here. everyone knock on wood this second! Hi, okay, a quick update: Apparently, the new servers will be running tomorrow at noon, and then I hope to have the site migrated to them within a day or so. I fully expected them sooner, I am pretty annoyed at the server place, but I guess they had to order some extra stuff to get them going (specifically, twelve fast SCSI 72gb hard drives). Unfortunately, this delay means that this week's sunday/monday busy period is still using the old servers, which has caused some problems. I have had to disable the template changing features for non-gold members a few times, and also the add entry feature a bit (but less). I understand people's frustration over this, but really the only 2 options I have are: 1) Disable these things at peak hours for non-gold members. 2) Don't disable, and let everyone get errors and lose work and get angry. The third option would be to have had new servers up earlier, but this didn't happen because: 1) Colocation places are all so, so slow. 2) The site has had a huge spike in traffic lately, making it need new servers faster than I expected anyway and most importantly... 3) I would love to have 3 times the servers that I need all the time, but I would need 3 times the money that comes in from gold members. I would even love 2 times the servers, but I would need 2 times the money.. you see how this works. Now, I am not complaining or anything, I'm just saying, yes I really wish the server situation was never an issue, but the only way I could make it NEVER EVER an issue would be to get rid of free accounts, which would suck. The current situation where there are short periods each night where you can't add an entry unless you're a gold member, just until the new servers are ready, I think we can all agree is much preferable. By Andrew Smales. 7:41 p.m. - Mar. 04, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- more server updates. I am running out of subject lines for this. Ugh, thursdays are normally nice nights, not too busy, but tonight is super duper busy, so the servers have been taking a bit of a beating. I've done the turn-off thing temporarily though to help it out. ANYHOW, the good news is I am less than 24 hours away from taking delivery of 4 brand new, super-nice servers at a new datacenter, and I figure it'll take maybe 1-3 days to get them set up (but I'm obviously shooting for as soon as possible) and get the site migrated over to them, at which point things should be super sweet, and this is why: At the currrent datacenter I'm at, getting a new server set up takes a while (their rush setup is 1-3 days, normal is 4-7 or so), but at the new one, if I need a new database server set up, it should be up in 24 hours or less (I have a couple of servers there now and the latest one, that runs the diaryland webmail, took like 6 hours, awesome). Also, at the new place, my new setup is really amenable to growth and there are no big impediments, so as the site has huge growth bursts like it has lately, it'll be covered quite well. This is something that affects the site more and more lately, and I'm very very happy with the new setup. So, the upshot is, the new server situation looks good, very good. It's at a datacenter I've had servers at since 1999 (actually, it's where Diaryland was hosted for, and their network is very very solid (although to be fair, the place they're at now is great for that too), and once the migration is done (which will involve a few hours in the middle of the night where the members area will be a bit feature-limited), things are going to be great. Plus, less time wrestling with server issues for me gives me more time for.. well, everything else! So, good times ahead, and sorry again for the crappiness lately, a tiny part of the reason it's taken a while to get everything sorted is because I wasn't sure whether to move to a new datacenter for a while, and was dickering around seeing what was viable, etc. (cause to tell the truth, moving is costing the site a lot of money, the new place costs a bit more, but more importantly, I have to pay for both sets of servers for at least one monthly billing period. This month's server bills would buy a car. A new car. A pretty nice new car. Or more applicable to my personal dreams in life: A few space basses. Oh dear, beautiful space bass, one day I will hold you and we will blast off in the mothership together). I'll keep this news section updated as things go along. By Andrew Smales. 10:47 p.m. - Feb. 27, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- long winded server update Hi! Okay, just an update on the server situation: The new server is still being set up, it's sort of a pain how long it's taking, and once it's up I have to test a bit, because in order to properly balance the load between what will be 3 backend servers, I need to re-architect a small bit of how the members area works. But overall it's very close to being ready. I have made the changes mentioned below a few times when the server has been super busy, and I think twice now I have actually had to very temporarily shut down the "add entry" thing for non-gold members. This obviously is frustrating, and I sincerely HATE having to do it, but the alternative is getting a bunch of errors when thousands of people try to add an entry at the same time during the busiest times. This is definitely not something that will continue though, and anytime it does, I am watching closely and turning entry adding back on as fast as possible. I have had a few angry emails about it, and what can I say, I wish the new server hadn't been delayed and messed up a bunch of times, but it has, and this is about the only good solution. If you think that letting gold members do things when the server is busy is "favouritism", I don't know what to say, other than: 1. They paid for a service, and if they don't get it, that would be cheating them. And really, the only thing that keeps the site going is money from gold memberships, without that noone at all would be able to use the site ever (or I'd have to come up with severely annoying/scummy ways to make money like constant pop-up ads, selling personal information, etc.). 2. The actual server load (in CPU terms) from just gold members is hardly anything anyway, so letting them do things or not doesn't add any load to the server hardly. Anyhow so yeah, I just wanted to reassure everyone that this is not permanent. This is the first time I've ever had to shut off entry adding even for a short time since this site started in 1999, and it sucks and is something I hate having to do, but you can still write entries in notepad or simpletext and then just add them 20 minutes later, and in a matter of days it won't be an issue again ever. The site is just growing so so fast right now that until the new server is ready, the current ones can't handle all the new users all at once during peak hours. By Andrew Smales. 4:50 p.m. - Feb. 24, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- more network update Okay, update on the network: It's still a bit wonky, it's mostly okay now but is a bit volatile still, so if you have trouble accessing your diary or the site in general, that's what it is. The network place is working on it I guess and told me they have it almost fixed, but a short while ago they did have to take the network down for 5 minutes to reboot something, identify the attackers, etc., so there may be other points like that. Super sorry, this does indeed suck, it's so frustrating. And also sorry for my bad typing on the blow news entry i was typing from a tiny keyboard, I was out and checking in remotely. By Andrew Smales. 8:56 p.m. - Feb. 22, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - Aaagh. if you had trouble getting to the site this affternoon, it was cause our network provider what seems to be some sort of DOS attack affecting them. Usually they fix those much faster, but I'm not sure what the details were yet. anyhow , back now sorry about that! By Andrew Smales. 4:42 p.m. - Feb. 22, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- an update on server stuff Hello and happy tuesday! Okay, I am faced with a few problems lately regarding the new server, it is taking a while to get set up. And until it gets set up, the members area has been volatile because of being extra busy lately. So, I have come up with a solution that I think should work pretty well: During peak hours (when the members area is most busy) until the new server is set up, unless you are a gold or supergold member, you will not be able to alter your template, you'll have to wait until the server is less busy. The two things that use the majority of the server power are adding entries and changing templates, so by greatly cutting down the number of people change templates, this should make the existing servers a lot more stabile. It's inconvenient to have to wait to change to change your template, yup, but it's the best compromise I can come up with to keep the quality of service up. So anyhow yeah, that's the deal, I'll see how this goes and report later, I am very hopeful that it'll fix a majority of the problems that have been cropping up lately, and once the new backend server is ready it will be over anyhow! By Andrew Smales. 6:26 p.m. - Feb. 18, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- crazy night Yikes, the site has been absolutely crazy tonight, almost 2.5 times as busy as a normal Monday night (which is already the busiest night of the week). I don't know what it is, maybe everyone is stuck inside because of weather, or eager to discuss the surprise Joe Millionaire ending (I can't believe the Butler was actually his dad!*), but wow, yikes. I'm still fixing up the new server setup, I really wish it had been ready by now, if I had known tonight would be this nuts I would have tried even harder to have it going. Anyhow, sorry for anyone who has had troubles, the new server will be up super soon, and I really can't see this sudden burst of traffic lasting a ton longer, it's weird (but nice! And wow, there were 14 new signups in the time it took me to write this paragraph, what the heck!). * nah, I just thought it'd be funny to pretend that was the surprise ending for people on the west coast or who taped it or whatever. By Andrew Smales. 11:42 p.m. - Feb. 17, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- brief update I just wanted to write a short note to let you know that if you've had any slow times in the members are lately at night (usually for brief spurts sometimes between about 8 and 11 eastern time when the site is busiest), it won't last long, I'm in the midst of getting another database server set up, as well as doing a bunch of other little fix-ups. One thing I have done too is I've deleted the diaries of anyone who hasn't updated in 5 months, but read carefully: the entries are still in the database and the accounts are still open. If you have a diary you haven't updated that doesn't show up and you want it still, just use the tech support form and we'll regenerate the html files for you. Okay, I'm off to continue the server stuff! There are a few things I'm really looking forward to adding to the site once I have the general fixups all done (things that need a slightly different setup, hence some of the internal improvements I'm doing). By Andrew Smales. 10:20 p.m. - Feb. 11, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- just some boring stuff! Hi! Not much news, I just have had a few things come up lately, I want to mention 1 new thing and remind people of a few basic things: 1. I upped the space limit for supergold accounts to 15 megs of image space a day or two ago. So if you're supergold, that is why you're suddenly using a smaller percentage or your space than before! 2. For tech support, click the "help section and FAQs" in the members area, and submit a request that way. Tech support via email used to be the method we used of course, but now it isn't, so make sure to do that so your email doesn't get missed! 3. If you spam a bunch of people (via email, notes, guestbooks, etc.) advertising your diary, you will be shut down, because as stated over and over, this is against the terms of service. For some reason people have been doing this a bunch lately, especially some reviews sites, and as long as I can verify it is indeed you doing it using the logs, your diary will be gone, deleted, kaput. So do not spam people, they will complain to me, I will check the logs, and you will be deleted (also everyone who you have annoyed will send bad karma your way!), and it's a drag, I'd rather everyone was just considerate, nice and happy. By Andrew Smales. 1:06 a.m. - Feb. 03, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- server thing Sorry, the members area was down for about 10 minutes just now. This was an emergency thing to fix a particularily annoying technical thing that popped up, I wish I could have added a warning that it'd be down first, sorry for any inconvenience! By Andrew Smales. 8:44 p.m. - Jan. 27, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- network outage finished Yugh, the site was just unreachable for at least 90 minutes,probably a bit more. It just came up and I haven't heard the final word from my network provider (their whole network was down, it wasn't just Diaryland) yet, but I phoned them before and the guy on phones seemed to think it was a router, but I think maybe that's just a standard line he was giving, cause there has apparently been a really big DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack on many many internet servers tonight which started right when Diaryland started getting wonky, so if I was a betting man I'd guess that's it for sure (while I was sitting around waiting for Diaryland to come back, a lot of the sites I went to read in the meantime were super slow or didn't work at all). Anyhow, the network is back, and if I hear anything else, I'll post it here. I have been slow at the news lately, stupid flu. update: Here is a story explaining fully what happened. By Andrew Smales. 4:29 a.m. - Jan. 25, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- contest done, so many users it's nuts! Oops, I was an hour late, but I just did the drawing for the Swappingtons draw mentioned below, and the 2 winners have been emailed. I'll list their DiaryLand usernames once they let me know what they are (and assuming they don't have private diaries they don't want seen), but yeah, one person was in the U.K. and one in the U.S.A. If you didn't win, don't fret, I'm going to have another DiaryLand/Swappingtons draw again next monday, and as long as you write "Diaryland" as the username who referred you when you sign up for Swappingtons, and list at least one item, you too could win a SuperGold membership. The odds are better than almost any contest you'll find too (I'll try to figure out how many people exactly were eligible and post that later). In other news, I just noticed that DiaryLand is about to go over 800,000 users today. That's crazy!!! By Andrew Smales. 1:00 p.m. - Jan. 20, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- a chance to get a free supergold membership I am doing something I have never done: I am giving away a year-long supergold membership. In fact, I am giving away 2. Here is the deal: I just launched a new website, Swappingtons.com, which is a place where people can swap books, CDs and DVDs. The problem I have is that because the site is only a few hours long, there aren't many items listed on it, which makes it less useful than it will be in a little while when there are tons of things on it. So, if you go to the site and decide you have a book, CD or DVD you want to list on it, you just need to sign up there and put "diaryland" as the user who sent you there when the signup form asks you that. Then, at noon EST on Monday, January 20, 2002 (that is this next monday coming up), I will draw two names from the people who put "diaryland" in that field, and if you are one of them, as long as you've listed at least 1 item for swap on the site, I will give you a year of SuperGold membership. If you're already Gold or SuperGold, you can have banner views instead (or an extra year), and if the person who I draw hasn't listed an item, I'll draw someone else. So there you go, just something to think about, I'll list the 2 winners here on monday at noon (and email them of course)! By the way, because I do anticipate it taking a little while for this new site to really get going (because it's a new concept and people get into it a little slower than stuff they know like "free guestbooks!"), I have no doubt that if you do enter this draw by listing an item, you'll have a good chance of winning! By Andrew Smales. 8:59 p.m. - Jan. 16, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- finally you can password-protect some entries and leave others public Hi all. I just added a new feature for gold and supergold members, the ability to password protect some entries and leave some public. It works like this: When you add an entry, there is a box you can check to make the entry private. If you check that, the entry goes into a special /private/ folder, which is like a second little diary inside your diary basically (there is some more info here in the FAQ section). So, if this is something you think you might like, give it a go, and let us know through the web-based help system if you have any problems or questions. This is a feature that people have been asking for basically since I started the site, but it required a fairly substantial re-working of the way DiaryLand works internally, but I've finally gotten to it, and I think it's pretty decent! This was the number 1 most requested feature (at least it has been since I added the previous most-requested features), so I hope it provides a lot of usefulness and convenience to everyone who uses it, let me know if you have comments or problems with it! (through the web help system). By Andrew Smales. 12:54 p.m. - Jan. 14, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- everything is back to normal! Howdy y'all! Sorry that the members area was just mostly showing "sorry, doing some changes, back soon"-type message for the last hour or two, but I had to make some fairly deep changes to the way certain parts of the system are set up so that I could add something. More details later, but in the meantime, if you have any weird problems let me know (but I'm pretty sure you won't, a lot of the downtime was making sure the changes I made didn't break anything). Oh also, I should mention, that when I do have to take the members area down, I usually try to do it in the middle of the night, but it was pretty slow tonight and I had to get this done as soon as possible. I blocked the "add an entry" pages for about 45 minutes before I actually had to make changes that might affect entries, so if you think you lost an entry because of this, let me know, but you shouldn't have unless you had that page open and were writing for more than 45 minutes, and your browser cache settings are goofy. (I only add this because I am sort of tired of writing to people who write "DiaryLand destroyed my entry" in their diary and asking what happened, and then having them say "my computer crashed as I was writing it". I swear I have had that conversation, more often than I can believe. But no offence if it was with you haha!) Man, lots of news lately eh! By Andrew Smales. 11:54 p.m. - Jan. 10, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- safari and the members' area I've received a couple of reports that you can't log into DiaryLand using the new Apple browser that's in beta, Safari. I have read that there is a possible problem with how Safari handles http redirects, which the login script uses, so I am hoping to get to figure this out soon. Unfortunately, although I use a mac myself, I just found out that the new browser only runs on system 10.2, which I don't have. So my advice is to keep using MSIE or Mozilla for now, and I will try and figure the problem out as soon as I can. Or maybe if Apple fixes the bug (judging from the reader feedback at macintouch they have a lot of bugs to work out) it'll work in the next version (you can't really blame them for things not working in a 3 or 4 day old beta version really hah!). Also if you happen to know what's up, you can email andrew - at - diaryland.com. update: Apparently it works if you do not check the "save my password" button, which narrows it down, so I'll try and have it 100% fixed this weekend, but until then, don't save your password if you are using Safari! By Andrew Smales. 11:41 a.m. - Jan. 10, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- some notes about notes! Hi guys! Just a note to say that if you got any emails recently saying that someone signed your notes, but by the time you looked there was no new signing, that was because some spammers signed up for DiaryLand and went spamming notes pages with lame "I write to you for urgent help!" messages asking for money (if you're anything like me you probably get a lot of these in email spam. If not, I am jealous of you haha!). Also, someone else was doing something similar with SignMyGuestbook.com guestbooks (but this time advertising some adult site) a day ago or so, so I deleted all of those from the database (if this affects you and the message still shows up on your actual guestbook, just sign the guestbook to regenrate the html pages and it'll disappear). I got a lot of mails about both of these things, and I thank everyone who wrote, it's useful to know when a spammer is around right away. And actually, this isn't 100% DiaryLand news, but it affects a lot of us, so: Speaking of SignMyGuestbook, I have had to put a spam-blocker in place there which prevents you from signing the same guestbook too often. This was due to numerous cases of people harassing and spamming other users via the guestbooks, and I guess it's inconvenienced some people who like to sign guestbooks a lot.. I'll figure something out, but for now the best thing to do would be to hang tight, and use the notes feature here. I know that makes it so only DiaryLand members can sign though, if that's a problem you should consider using the supergold comments feature. I know people don't all have gold or supergold membership of course, but even the full supergold is like 15 cents a day or something, and includes way more than just the comments (including a webmail system that two people have called "better than Hotmail" to me in emails in the last week, nice!). So I'm just saying, if the loss of rapid-posting on guestbooks is seriousy killing you, that's an alternative! Okay that's all, I have to go work on some more stuff related to this, the whole harassment/spamming thing is really really bad lately, I don't know if it's just cause the site is getting bigger and more popular (and lately especially the signup rate is speeding up like mad) and has finally just hit a certain point where the trouble-makers are a big issue, or maybe people just have the cranky January blues or what, but in summary: Everyone be nice, cause this is seriously eating all of my time and I want to work on better features and other stuff (see entry below). By Andrew Smales. 11:59 a.m. - Jan. 09, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- webmail was wonky, is fixed now! Hi! Sorry to anyone who couldn't check their webmail for the last half-hour or so (I think? Thereabouts anyhow!). The problem was some new software I installed on the webmail server earlier which had a weird conflict with the webmail stuff, yoinks. It's back up now, and if you were just using a normal email program to check your webmail then you shouldn't have noticed anything except maybe a "wrong password" error if you checked during a certain 5 minute period where I thought the problem was something other than it was. Oh and happy new year! By Andrew Smales. 5:19 p.m. - Jan. 02, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- members area fixed Sorry, one of the databases went down for an hour just now (which hasn't happened for ages) and i was at an xmas thing and it took me a while to get to a computer to fix it, ugh. Anyhow, it's back now, sorry about that, I should be around now to fix any similar problems, but this one was just flukey, the database daemon died, and then the monitoring program that is supposed to check and fix that didn't kick in like it has in the past. I found the bug causing it I think though, but anyhow yeah, that's why parts of the members area didn't work just now. Also: Merry Christmas haha! By Andrew Smales. 2:46 p.m. - Dec. 24, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- a short pre-xmas entry Hello! Well, it's been ages since I updated the news, it's pretty shameful. It's a mix of me being busy, trying to relax and rest a bit (failed), and also just there not being a huge amount of important DiaryLand news. I would like to take this chance to mention a few things though: - DiaryLand gold and supergold memberships make awesome gifts! Ask for one, or give someone one, it'll be great! I should have made a better system for buying people gold memberships as gifts so that people who don't use DiaryLand can do it easier, umm oops, but it's still very easy! - I need beta testers for a big new DiaryLand desktop app thing. If you can email me ([email protected], and use the subject line "BETA TESTER APP") your computer's OS and speed I will send you details in the near future. I need people using all versions of Windows and MacOS for this, and I may not reply to everyone depending on how many people reply, but it'll be a fairly short beta period until I release the thing to everyone anyhow, I've tested it quite a lot now myself. By Andrew Smales. 10:58 p.m. - Dec. 22, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- new FAQs! Good work Sammy! Hey remember when I announce the daily news list below? And then you signed up and I didn't send anything to it? That was cause I got sick! But I'm starting that soon, except this week looks to be rather crazy for me due to holiday junk. But here is good news: My helpful helper Sammy has been doing a lot of tech support for the site as you should know by now, and I said "hey Sammy, keep track of all the questions people ask us all the time and make an awesome FAQ" and then Sammy did it, and now if you click the "help section and FAQs" link in the members area there are a bunch more FAQs there that are super-helpful. I would write more here but I am tired and have a lot of crap to do! So that's all for now. STAY COOL! By Andrew Smales. 12:40 a.m. - Dec. 08, 2002 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- new daily mailing list for Diaryland members! Hi all! Hopefully all of you are on the Diaryland news notify list. If you are, you may notice that I haven't sent anything to it in quite a while. The reason for that is partly because I don't want to overuse it and annoy people, and partly because I just forget to send to it when I add new features and whatnot to the site. But from now on I am going to start sending news to that every week, so look out for that in the next very short while. In the meantime though, I am also creating a daily notify list for people who want every single scrap of news possible, and also to carry news that doesn't fit on the main list, like news submitted by members about any projects they might be running, HTML tips, writing tips, etc. It should be a whole big fun hootenanny thing, so sign up right here and expect the first edition sometime today! By Andrew Smales. 11:28 a.m. - Nov. 27/2002
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