news's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- daily stats reports delayed but up now! A note for gold members, the "general" section of the stats which updates every day wasn't updated early this morning as it usually is, but I am running it now and you will be able to check in a minute and see your total stats for yesterday (the referrer info and host info that's updated immediately has all been fine of course, just the daily report wasn't). This was just due to a fix in the stats system I was making yesterday, when I was done making it I didn't set one thing back to normal properly, sorry about that! By Andrew Smales. 10:36 a.m. - Mar. 15, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- RSS feature Just wanted to do a quick pre-announcement that the RSS feature is in place now, as of today, anytime you update, you will have an index.rss file in your diary ( username.diaryland.com/index.rss ) that lists your latest entries for use in an RSS reader. If you have no clue what any of this means, don't even worry about it, I'll be writing an FAQ on it later. This was originally going to be a feature for gold members, but it's now for everyone (I am going to have to just double-check what kind of server load it generates, but it should be fine). Oh one note, your rss file will only show up when you add your next entry, if you go check for it first and it's not there, that's why. Also, sorry I haven't updated the news in the last little while, me and Sammy had a baby recently! I won't go into it here but suffice it to say that I'll be doing a lot more work on the site (there's some neat new stuff coming apart from the RSS feature) starting right about today, since we're in a bit of a routine now, and we'd both really, really, really appreciate it if everyone reading this bought a year-long supergold membership haha. Seriously, think of it as a baby gift from you to DiaryLand, even if you don't need all the awesome features you get with it! I will even link it to make it easy haha (I write "haha" when I really mean "seriously, do it, now!" haha). By Andrew Smales. 1:28 p.m. - Feb. 16, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- quick note on slowness just now Sorry about the site being pretty slow a half hour ago or so, our network provider is having some issues today, but I'm in contact with them about it, and they seem to be on top of things, and the site is fast now, hopefully will stay that way the rest of the evening! By Andrew Smales. 5:07 p.m. - Feb. 09, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- quick update number 2! Another quick update: Just wanted to add everything is pretty much back to normal, all the little bugs worked out from the server move, the regeneration queue is up to date, etc. A few things have to be sorted, but mostly everything has been normal for most of the weekend! By Andrew Smales. 3:39 p.m. - Jan. 25, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- quick update Just a quick update, it's taking a while for all the diaries to regenerate on the new server. There are just so many diaries now! Most of them are back, but if you've had to click the "regenerate my diary" button, don't worry, your request is in the queue and it shouldn't be too too much longer now. And noone's entries or notes or profile or anything are lost, no worries on that. By Andrew Smales. 10:27 a.m. - Jan. 21, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- server back up, will write more later. Quick note: Obviously, the site has been down for the past while, since about 9pm last night. There was a disk failure on the main web server, and I'll go into details about why it took so long later, but for now, things are back up and running on a new server. No data was lost. There are a few things I am still working on: - gold members' images were restored from 1 week-old backups. If you uploaded images since then however we will have them back as soon as the old server has been totally fixed, I will do that and then post here. - some diaries that haven't been updated in a while are not up yet, they will be soon, the migration goes from latest-updated backwards. - gold members' images are as of this writing not all back, but are coming back rapidly, they'll all be up soon. - supergold comments pages are not up for everyone. If you update your diary, they will all show up, also I will be running a regeneration program to put them back soon. - passworded diaries are locked, but will not open with the password. I will fix this later, to get in right away, just go to the lock/unlock form and resubmit it, that should fix it. Let me know if you have any problems beyond these, I'm on the lookout for things I have missed of course. By Andrew Smales. 3:32 p.m. - Jan. 20, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- new feature: domain hosting Okay, I am hereby officially launching the domain hosting feature as of right now. There is an extra fee for this feature, and you can use it whether you're a gold member or not, since it's not really part of the gold/supergold system. Domain hosting allows you to point a domain to your diary, so instead of telling people "my diary is at username.diaryland.com" you could tell them "my diary is at some-name-you-make-up.com" (or .net, .org, etc.). Normally, buying and setting up domain names can be a bit of a pain, it can be a complicated process even for someone who has done it before, but we've gone out of our way to make this easy, all you have to do is to check to see if the domain you want is taken or not, and then sign up for it with us, and we'll set it all up for you. We've partnered with an ICANN-accredited registrar so that we can make this easy, and it's pretty inexpensive too, the whole thing costs just under $30/year: 19.95/year for the domain hosting and then 9.95 extra/year for the domain name itself. To put this in perspective, the name Diaryland.com costs us $35/year to own, just for the domain name, that's what a lot of the registrars charge. So you're actually getting the entire feature and a domain name for less than it costs us to just own one domain name, yoinks! Okay, so click here to take the first step and check if the domain name you want is available!. By Andrew Smales. 11:40 a.m. - Jan. 14, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- quick favicon update Okay, 1 thing quickly: If you haven't read the favicon news because the "read more" link didn't work for you inside the members area, oops, my bad, try now and it will work. I have had reports that the favicons do not always work in Safari and it seems to be that favicons that are created in Windows programs as BMP files (rather than GIFs or JPGs) will not show up, so if you are worried about this, you can create them that way. Also, I guess favicons are really unreliable in Internet Explorer, and I am trying to get to the bottom of that. One thing I will say though is that while IE is a nice browser, Firefox is generally considered to be much better now I think. I know I love it and most people I know who have tried it feel the same. If you have not tried it, you really should give it a go. For those who haven't tried it, Firefox is a new version of what used to be called Mozilla, which is basically what used to be called the Netscape Browser. Basically, they said "Okay, let's work on this forever, and change names a bunch of times, but then finally get it right", and they did, Firefox is good, it has nice pop-up blocking action, tabbed browsing,etc. DiaryLand is designed to work in all browsers of course though. p.s. Do I already have a news item half-written about 2 new features that will launch tomorrow all things going as planned? Yes I do. By Andrew Smales. 1:49 a.m. - Jan. 12, 2005 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- favicons are awesome and fun Okay, I should link this, I added a feature to DiaryLand where you can now upload favicons to your images directory. What's a favicon? Well, if you look up in this window, you should see a little orange "D" icon, and that's what it is. I never actually do this at all, but I'm going to link my own diary to show you one that I made in about 2 minutes using a really simple program. See that little face icon? That's a favicon. The program I used, as well as a more thorough explanation of the whole favicon thing and how to make one show up on your diary, is located right here, and let me know by email (andrew at diaryland.com) if you make some good ones, I'm quite curious to see what people come up with! By Andrew Smales. 2:02 p.m. - Dec. 31, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1000 free banner views for gold members Quick note: If you're a gold or supergold member and want 1000 free banner views, use the help form with the subject line "1000 free banners" by tomorrow (december 30th) at 1 p.m. EST, and we'll add them to your account (I'll be adding them at noon tomorrow). There's no real reason for this, I just haven't done it in a while and I've been coding all day and am a bit dazed haha. That's all the news right now, I have about 3 features pretty much ready to go (RSS feeds, favicon.ico uploading which is actually working now but I have to do a write-up for it), and one other that I don't want to spill the beans on. Feel free to guess what it is when you fill out the banner views request, if you get it right I'll give you an extra 1000 views. And maybe someone will guess a great feature I haven't thought of before hah! By Andrew Smales. 4:06 p.m. - Dec. 29, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- christmas gift update I received 2 emails asking about this today, so that qualifies it as "news" to me haha: Yes, if you buy someone a gold gift membership today or tomorrow, it will be set up, we don't take holidays off or anything for that stuff. So if you need a last minute gift for someone, go ahead, and it'll be set up on time! By Andrew Smales. 3:25 p.m. - Dec. 24, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- banner update Hi. Just a note to say that earlier I killed I think all of the paid banners that were running the "WINNER!" sort of flashy things. I didn't realize how many of those were running, yoinks. And worst of all, they pay much less than the normal non-annoying ads per click haha. Anyway, it does look like I'll be leaving the paid ads up, cause they make some money (and god does the site need it lately, seriously go buy someone a gold membership for christmas and never engage me in a conversation on the effect of the weak US dollar on my exchange rates haha), and they actually aren't running very often, it's still mostly diary banners and the good old "GOLD!" one every loves so much haha. Let me know if you see any annoying ones though! By Andrew Smales. 12:51 a.m. - Dec. 23, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- saturday night's alright for fixing stupid bugs in the banner running system. Oops, for part of today, and part of yesterday (basically whenever I was testing out the new ad system), some entries (25% of them to be precise) that people wrote had their times messed up, and instead of a neatly formatted time like "12:34 am" it came out "1027252727" or something like that. This was oddly enough a result of a teeny change I made in the banner-running code, which I have now fixed of course. If you have any entries that have that weird time in them, just edit them, add a real time and that'll fix them, sorry about that! Okay now read the item below about buying gift memberships if you haven't already haha! By Andrew Smales. 12:34 a.m. - Dec. 19, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- give or receive gold membership for xmas! plus some misc. stuff Ello ello! Just a quick note to remind you, gold and supergold memberships make great gifts, so don't forget about the wishlist feature where you can put one easy link in your diary and people will see it and hopefully buy you a gift membership. Just make a link from your template to this url: http://members.diaryland.com/edit/wishlist.phtml?user=username (you should replace that username part with your actual username of course. Click here if you don't know how to make a link). You can also give that address to relatives and friends of course, so they can buy you a membership, or renew your existing one! In other news, you may have seen some different banners running for a short time on thursday afternoon - I've been testing out selling commercial banners on the site. It's actually not a new thing, I've run commercial banners in the past, back in 1999 it was originally how the site was supposed to support itself, but the bottom fell out of the online ad market a few months after starting the site, doh! The costs of running the site keep increasing, so it's something I am going to try out a bit more and see how it goes, but I'll try to keep the "YOU ARE A WINNER!" type banners from running. It'll be interesting to see if running commercial banners brings in much extra money to keep things going (we need to get some new servers in the near future), but if they wind up being disruptive flashy blinky banners that's not good. So anyhow, just thought I'd mention it since I did get a few emails from people confused by the "WINNER!"-type banner running briefly. Okay, that's all. Any gold members who are into RSS feeds, let me know through the web support page, I have that feature ready to go, I just need a few people to test it out and make sure they work across various rss clients. By Andrew Smales. 7:29 a.m. - Dec. 17, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- banner promotion extended a couple of days Due to some confusion among current gold and supergold members over whether the banners promotion yesterday only counted for new members (it counts for everyone), I've extended it till monday: When you sign up for a year of gold or supergold, you get extra bannerviews, so instead of getting 10,000 for a year of gold, you get 30,000, and with a year of supergold, you get 75,000 instead of 30,000 (75 thousand ads normally cost 30 bucks on their own!). This offer as I said extends to current gold members, whatever time you buy will get tacked onto the end of the time you have remaining on your membership right now. By Andrew Smales. 12:35 p.m. - Nov. 27, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- supergold comments spam problem fixed Someone was spamming supergold members' comments forms today with dumb ads for lord knows what, just the garden variety spam you'd find in your email or whatnot, so I've banned them from doing it. Only a few of the affected people wrote me, if this happens to you, feel free to let us know, we like to ban them as soon as possible. By Andrew Smales. 1:39 a.m. - Nov. 16, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- paypal seems back and fine Okay, the payment stuff seems to be back, so everyone buy away haha. Please!! Also, someone wrote in asking what happened if they didn't renew in time and their images disappear: Well, don't worry, we don't actually delete them, they just go offline, but once you renew, they come back! Okay that's all, just wanted to post this in case anyone read the last news item and said "ah, won't bother buying gold tonight then". By Andrew Smales. 12:53 a.m. - Oct. 12, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- some problems with the billing system today Just wanted to mention, if you've been trying to buy or renew a gold or supergold membership at all today, Paypal (who we use for billing) has been having some technical problems, so it takes a few tries to get it going. I've phoned them and they swear it won't be long now, so don't worry, it uhh.. won't be long now I guess haha. Anyhow, sorry for the inconvenience (very sorry since this happened the same day I got this month's server bill, very depressing contrast). By Andrew Smales. 9:18 p.m. - Oct. 11, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- quick note Sorry, the site was just inaccessible for about 15 or 20 minutes while I had to reboot a server that was acting up. All back now, sorry for the inconvenience! By Andrew Smales. 12:27 p.m. - Oct. 04, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- signmyguestbook problem Ugh, signmyguestbook is down right now for most people, because the domain expired EVEN THOUGH I renewed it before the expiration date with the registrar, who apparently didn't process it correctly or something. I've re-renewed it now, and it should be back when the DNS refreshes, which I think is still earlier in the morning, so by tomorrow morning it should be fine. Super sorry about that, and UGH, this is the second time they have done this to me, super super super frustrating. Don't worry though, Diaryland's domain is run through a different registrar, and is up to date for a good long while. By Andrew Smales. 8:12 p.m. - Sept. 24, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- actually, 2 Diaryland weddings this weekend.. Ah hell, I wasn't going to mention it, but I can't help myself: me and Sammy are getting married this weekend! We didn't meet through Diaryland, but we're naming our first kid Addanentry anyway, it's an exotic and unique name with zing. I'm not going to be crass and link to some online gift registry here, because I'm sure everyone already knows how to send well wishes (and paypal cash hah) to [email protected]. No really though, we are, it's sort of crazy eh! By Andrew Smales. 12:04 p.m. - Sept. 24, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- small change, and D-land wedding I made a slight change to how the paragraph breaks work when you add an entry.. They used to enter a P tag no matter what, but now they do that if you hit enter twice (as most people do), but if you just hit it once, to write a poem for instance, they just add a line break (BR tag), so basically what comes out on the page looks more like how it looks in the entry editor. This mostly just makes a difference to people writing poetry, or things where they want things on lines that aren't separated by blank lines. Maybe I'm explaining this badly haha, but anyhow, that's something I did. Also, conigratulations to Diaryland users jondavid and oct0ber, who are getting married this weekend after meeting on Diaryland! Good luck guys! By Andrew Smales. 11:58 a.m. - Sept. 24, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- downtime fixed Super sorry about the downtime just now, there was a hardware issue with one of the DNS servers, and the server place had to fix it. Apparently they were slow because they're preparing for the storm (the server in question is in florida). Anyhow, it's all back now, super sorry, ugh!! By Andrew Smales. 3:06 p.m. - Sept. 03, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- email thingy thing Hey, just realized that a lot of the "Okay, your tech support request has been completed, go here to read it" emails haven't been being sent lately due to a change I was making, so I've fixed that! If you've got a request that you never got emailed about, go to your support history, it may actually have been answered and you might just not have received the mail about it. I keep meaning to update the news more often, but I keep figuring there isn't any exciting news really, but I think now that I've broken the seal, I'm goign to try updating it a lot more often, even if it means putting in less interesting stuff haha! Hope everyone is having a good summer! By Andrew Smales. 12:12 p.m. - Aug. 22, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- javascript trick worm thing Hey, if you clicked on a link, and it added an entry to your diary saying "i am so happy" or something like that, that's a javascript trick someone set up, and you can just delete the entry, it's harmless. I've fixed it so that can't happen anymore, and if you've seen any diaries with that in it, just let me know and I'll go in and remove it. By Andrew Smales. 11:18 a.m. - Jun. 18, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- slow diaries fixed Just a quick note, there was a problem this morning that was causing certain diaries and images to load very slowly, but I've fixed that, and I'll be keeping an eye out to make sure it doesn't happen again (but let me know if it does of course). By Andrew Smales. 10:21 a.m. - Jun. 15, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- busy servers lately Just an update on the servers that handle adding entries being busy in the last couple of days: We've had a really busy few days due to some press, and there are a lot more people than normal signing in and doing stuff, which has overloaded those servers basically, and when they get to a certain level of high activity, a monitor shuts off adding entries to non-gold members until the load cools down. This can take a few seconds or a few minutes. It can last longer, but I've been watching this carefully and there are quite a few times where you can get through no problem. Anyhow, some people have complained that it's "not fair" that the gold people can add, and I just want to explain that: Basically, we have to limit the adding somehow, and since the paying members have paid, that's the only logical way to narrow it down, and give them what they paid for. Anyhow, I have a pretty good way of taking a lot of load off the servers I'll be working on today and tonight by re-organizing where some entries are stored, so there should be a nice difference quite soon! Sorry for the inconvenience! By Andrew Smales. 11:28 a.m. - Jun. 08, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- webmail update Webmail update: It could take 12 more hours (possibly more, possibly less) to get the webmail drive all cloned, which is insane but apparently true. If you use the webmail system, I would recommend you change your email setup to forward to a different address for now, and I'm super, super sorry about this, I'm doing everything I can to get it back as soon as possible. By Andrew Smales. 8:03 p.m. - Apr. 16, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- webmail issues Sorry about the supergold webmail being down for a lot of today, I keep meaning to post, but it keeps looking like it's almost fixed. Anyhow, the problem is there's a hardware issue on the server that runs webmail, and it's either the actual server, or the hard drive, so we're cloning a copy of the hard drive before swapping anything up as an extra precaution, but while this shouldn't take very long usually, it's taking AGES. There are much, much smarter hardware guys than me at the server place who are overseeing this, but to me I think it may be taking so long because there is indeed some hard drive problem, which makes me extra glad to be taking this extra precaution. Sorry for the inconvenience, I hate not being able to access webmail a ton, but it really shouldn't take much longer, and once the drive is cloned, it should be a very very quick thing to get everything up and running again without the problems. By Andrew Smales. 6:25 p.m. - Apr. 16, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- quick note on entries from earlier Hi everyone. There was a problem with one of the database servers just after midnight east coast time, and if you added an entry between then and when I fixed it a couple of hours later, you may have noticed that your entry didn't show up on your list of entries to edit. If that happened to you, it's fixed now, but you should actually re-add the entry and then delete the old version, in order for it to work 100%. That's very easy to do, just go edit it, copy and paste the text, and then re-add it as a new entry. If you don't, little things will go wrong like the number at the bottom of your profile saying how many entries you have may not be correct. If you have any questions about this, let us know via the web support panel and we'll fix you up. Sorry about the hassle! By Andrew Smales. 3:19 a.m. - Apr. 08, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- diaries up after short downtime Sorry, for about the last hour or so, diaries were not coming up, although the members area and main front page were working. I was woken up earlier by the monitoring system with a problem that I fixed, but during the fixing, I shut down the monitoring system temporarily so it would stop phoning me. I guess due to sleepiness I forgot to turn it back on, so I didn't realize the actual diaries were still not restarted afterwards. So, yeah, back up now and sorry for that, and thanks to everyone who let me know via the web support system and email. By Andrew Smales. 11:26 a.m. - Apr. 02, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- hardware issues at colocation place fixed Sorry, the members area and individual diaries were just inaccessible for about an hour and twenty minutes (between 5:10 and 6:30 AM eastern time) while the server place had to do an emergency fix to a broken network switch that connects Diaryland to the internet at large. They seemed to do some crazy filtering or something during the fix so most of our IP's weren't working but one was (www.diaryland.com itself), sort of odd, I'll be curious to find out what was up with that. Anyhow, the site is back up now, sorry about that to everyone who was inconvenienced by the disruption (judging by the email I got, lots of Europeans, which makes sense considering the time of day. Pardon nous mes amis, les computers est fixee! Je peut fait les mots francophonal, moi est awesome!). By Andrew Smales. 6:30 a.m. - Mar. 09, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- just a quick update Hi all! Just wanted to update the news with some general stuff, since I haven't said much here lately.. I've been busy with various boring things lately, and there are a few new features I've had ready and been wanting to roll out for a while, but couldn't for various reasons. Anyhow, that's all done, so look for some new stuff very soon, including some (good) changes to the features on gold and supergold memberships. I'll keep you updated, just wanted to let you know stuff will be moving along now, after months and months of nothing really happening with the site (which is 100 times more frustrating to me than you, believe me). By Andrew Smales. 9:22 p.m. - Mar. 08, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- fake emails / virus going around Hi. There seems to be a virus going around telling Diaryland users that their email account is going to be de-activated and to open a .zip file that's in the email. If you receive this, do not open it, it's not real and people are looking into it now to determine who is sending it. Remember, noone from Diaryland will ever email you to ask you stuff like this, or ask for your password, etc. update: This is some sort of variant of the Bagle and Netsky viruses it looks like, which are apparently running rampant all over the internet. From what I can see, it does the basic virusy things, sends itself to everyone in your address book, that sort of thing. I think you can check mcafee.com for removal instructions, I am not sure yet if they'll work on this variant or not and am awaiting word from Mcafee on what's up with this. By Andrew Smales. 11:41 p.m. - Mar. 02, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- network stuff fixed Okay, an update on the news item below, this looks to be fixed as of late last night for everyone who it was affecting who has gotten back to me on it, but if you're still affected or someone you email or IM with is, let me know with a traceroute (they're seriously very easy to do and quick to email me, don't be stingy with them haha!). But yeah, I think it's fixed, and the network place say it is for what that's worth. By Andrew Smales. 9:50 a.m. - Feb. 03, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- apparent network problems for some UK members and AOL users, others? (updated info below for mac users to do traceroutes) Hi! So we're having some more reports from a few people today that they can't get to the site, and while it's obviously a network problem, I need some traceroutes from people who are affected to see what's up. So if you happen to not be able to get to the site but somehow are reading this (maybe you can get through intermittently or someone is copy and pasting you this after you telling them you can't get through), this would be great: At the moment you can't get through, open a DOS window (if you're using windows) and type this: tracert 69.0.251.11 (you can also try tracert members.diaryland.com and tracert diaryland.com actually) and then email me the results at help AT diaryland.com (if you have trouble copy and pasting from a DOS window you can send a screenshot). The more of those I get from people, the easier it is for me to show the network facility where the problem is. I am already in contact with them on this, but I only have 1 of those so far, and the more the better really. Anyhow, sorry about this to anyone who is affected, basically for the last month there have been a few times, as noted in the news below, where one of the networks that our colocation place connects to has been wonky and affected a very few people (literally a few in most cases, from what I can tell), and the fact it's only affecting small amounts of people complicates matters, since if everyone was having trouble, I'd know right away because there'd be hundreds of emails about it as soon as it happened, and would generally be easier to pinpoint. The good news is that I have plans to switch away from this colocation place in the near future, due to problems like this and their inability to stop them happening after the first incidence, and so even if this happens again once it's fixed today, it won't be for very long. UPDATE: If you're a mac user, you can use a program called Whatroute to do a traceroute. It's a fast download, and then you just need to enter "diaryland.com" or "members.diaryland.com" in the host field and it'll do a traceroute for you and then you can copy and paste me the info! By Andrew Smales. 5:30 p.m. - Feb. 02, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- chicago network trouble gone, i think Just wanted to check if anyone who was having problems getting to parts of the site due to the broken router in chicago was still having trouble. I know it's been cleared up for a few people, because they're being routed through a different carrier, but I'm not positive if everyone is back or not, anyone? If more people were affected I'd be able to know a lot easier, but it was only about a half dozen people who wound up writing that they were having problems. And if you're suddenly able to read this and weren't earlier today and last night, there are 2 entries below which explain, but to sum it up: A router was broken in chicago which was run by a company not affiliated with our provider, and it was causing network problems for a small amount of users, and it was very time-consuming and frustrating to get fixed. It was weird because usually stuff like this fixes itself in minutes, someone at the network facility in question I think usually catches the problem, but this time it took ages, and a lot of hassling from me (and presumably other sites who were affected), ugh. By Andrew Smales. 3:52 p.m. - Jan. 10, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- update on the network thing Okay, just an update: My provider are still I guess working on this, but are going slower than I hoped. I have personally contacted the ISP I use at home, since it's affected, and am hoping that THEY will also try and contact the carrier whose router is messed up. If you're one of the people who is affected, the best thing to do might be to contact your ISP and ask them why you can't get to your diary (or the members area if that's the part you can't get to), they'll probably guide you through doing a traceroute and then when they see where the holdup is, hopefully they can do something with your routing or whatnot. I'm not really sure how many people are affected either, since I can tell by the server logs that site traffic is normal, and only a couple of people have actually written about this, so feel free to email help at diaryland dot com if you can't get through, just so I know what's up. It's weird, networking issues like this happen so rarely, and usually are fixed super-fast, before I even have time to write to anyone, I don't know why this is taking so long, I keep just expecting the people with the bum router to notice any second and fix it, but it's been hours. Yugh! By Andrew Smales. 1:58 a.m. - jan. 10, 2004 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- network problems, mostly affecting (i think) some roadrunner and rogers customers Howdy! There's a network problem that is affecting some users (but not many, I've been checking the server logs and traffic is very normal, so it's a small amount of people affected), because of a slow or broken router somewhere between our servers and some ISPs. Basically, if you can't get to the members area, or individual diaries, or vice versa, it's because you're getting routed through a bum router operated by a provider that my server place uses. We know which router it is, and my providers have a ticket open with the company who runs it, and hopefully they'll have it sorted pretty fast. Sorry about this, it's pretty weird/annoying how it's happening (ie. even though all the IPs are beside each other, for a lot of affected people, the routing table is different for each IP, so they can get to certain parts of the server and not others). By Andrew Smales. - ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- short downtime while fixing a database thing Hi! I had to disable the members area just now for about an hour or two. There was a weird database problem where a file was corrupted that controls a certain part of the database configuration, so I had to copy a snapshot of the database over from one machine to another, which took a while because there are so so many entries. Anyhow, it's done now and everything is back to normal. If you added an entry earlier this evening and then tried to edit it but it didn't show up on your list of entries to edit, that is why, but it will now, sorry for the hassle! In other news, merry christmas to all christmas-celebrating people, and happy wishes, etc. to everyone in general from me and Sammy! By Andrew Smales. 8:58 p.m. - Dec. 24, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- wishlist reminder Just a quick note: There have been quite a number of gift gold memberships bought lately, I guess the holiday spirit is here and whatnot, so anyway, don't forget about the wishlist feature where you can put one easy link in your diary and people will see it and maybe buy you a gift membership. Just make a link from your template to this url: http://members.diaryland.com/edit/wishlist.phtml?user=username (you should replace that username part with your actual username of course. Click here if you don't know how to make a link) and sit back and wait. Or even better, mention and link it in your next entry as well, when I first set up this wishlist feature, I kept an eye on the people who people bought membership gifts for, and most of them had actually written a thing about it in their diary calling attention to it (it's easy to miss a new link added to someone's diary if they already have a bunch in there. Ok that's all for right now! By Andrew Smales. 3:06 p.m. - Dec. 09, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- more spyware stuff Just a quick update on the item below, it is looking like most of the diaries that are affected have a counter from fastonlineusers.com on them, and when I went to their site there are weird little links at the bottom to adult sites (some which have cryptic mentions of spyware), so for now I am assuming that the problem is probably with those counters, and I'd recommend that if you are using them you remove them. I cannot be 100% sure if that's the problem, but almost all of the sites throwing up the XXX toolbar pop-ups use a fastonlineusers counter thing. A few people wrote about spyware in general and weird pop-ups coming up here and there, and I think it's a good idea if you're running a windows computer to download and install the following 2 programs that will check if you have any spyware (aka. malware/scumware, etc.) on your computer, you'll probably be amazed if you've never run them before. If you ever get weird pop-ups while surfing around DiaryLand (or other sites), you definitely should run these: update: Okay, after a bit more looking into it, I am about 99.999% sure it's the fastonlineusers thing, people around the web are complaining about that script doing various things over time, like popping up banners and stuff. If you have that in your html, please remove it, and if you know someone who has it, tell them about it. By Andrew Smales. 7:47 p.m. - Nov. 19, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- tricky annoying pop-ups If you have had a pop-up come up on your site saying something like "click here to install FREE SEX XXX TOOLBAR" today, please write me (andrew at diaryland.com) and let me know. A couple of people have had that, and I can tell that it's being inserted into their diaries by a javascript include they have added from another site, but because they have a few in common I can't tell which, and it isn't popping up 100% of the time, so I can't really figure out which it is yet. When you see on diaries where people have added "wacky" counters, or little things that tell you the current weather, etc, those are usually added using javascript includes, and it seems like some company that people are using for a counter (I think, I have it narrowed down to a few scripts that the affected people have in common) is doing that to pop up an ActiveX control installer deal today. If this has happened to you, please please write me and tell me the diary it appeared on, since when I have a few more, I can figure out what javascript gadget they all have in common By Andrew Smales. 5:03 p.m. - Nov. 19, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- some new scumware that's messing with some members We've had a few people write in the past few days with a problem where links just show up in entries they write that point to some lame search engine, even though the user did not add the links themselves. After researching it a bit, it seems to be related to some new crappy "coolwebsearch" adware that hijacks your browser and which AdAware, Spybot, etc. don't catch yet. When you type certain words ("games" seems to be a common one) in your browser (and possibly in other programs I'd bet) it automatically adds a link to their hijack site. If you are having this problem, you probably want to check the following link, it seems to explain and it has a link to remove the spyware. I can't vouch for it working since my computer doesn't have the spyware on it to test it out, but give it a read, and check out the "how do i get rid of this?" link which takes you to a program to remove it: I'd appreciate any feedback from people who have this problem on if that link helped them out, you can write to andrew AT diaryland.com with your results, thanks. Also, I am including a mention of the crappy hijack site it takes you to, go-acct.com , just so search engines will find this page for other people with a similar problem, but don't go to it. By Andrew Smales. 11:27 a.m. - Nov. 18, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- some stuff Yoinks, it's been way too long since I updated the news! It's been an odd month for Diaryland, but now it's back to business. Basically, for the last month, Sammy has been away (but is back now mostly) and I've had to spend a lot of time on extra stuff (boring stuff related to the financial side of the site and keeping it running) which has left me without much time to keep up with a lot of things that I'd rather be doing. That's changing as of today though, and from here until the end of the year I'm officially declaring it Diaryland Renaissance Month (since it's my month, I am officially making it 6 weeks) during which time me and Sammy will be catching up with old support and I'll be adding a lot of stuff to the site, some new features (a few of which are about 95% done already but I just haven't had time to add the final touches in the past month) and a lot of little fixes. There should be new features for all levels of service, free, gold and supergold, and basically from here on out I'll be spending about 4 hours a day on support (if there's that much to do) and then the afternoon and evening on features stuff (I am guessing between 4-8 hours), and once a week I'll be sending out the Diaryland-News newsletter which I have sorely neglected lately. So what does this mean for you, the wonderful Diaryland user? Well, just keep an eye on the news section and around the site for improvements, and keep recommending the site to your friends, because if there's one thing above everything else that gets everything going around here it's watching the site grow and grow. It's been growing very, very nicely lately and that's so nice to see as I work on all this stuff. Also if everyone who reads this buys a 1-year supergold membership right now that'd be pretty motivating too haha, or at least I wouldn't have to spend another month on financial junk. Thanks, hope this is all coherent, and don't forget to send in wacky riddles for the newsletter (i am joking on that. I think. Maybe if I run out of content for it, who knows haha). p.s. here is the form to sign up for the newsletter if you're not already: By Andrew Smales. 2:07 p.m. - Nov. 17, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- webmail update Okay, update: the webmail server's new drive after the failure last week died, and I'm sending it to a place to recover the files. In the meantime, I'm reinstalling the webmail and restoring the server from the latest backups I have, which are fairly recent, but it means that some recent mail won't show up until I get the really broken drive back from the recovery place, and I have yet to send it and get a time on that, but a few days is probably the miminum to shoot for. This sucks extremely badly and I super-apologize to everyone affected with the webmail, dealing with this all today and trying to get the server place to keep me informed and keeping them informed and trying to get them moving, etc., has pretty much given me a heart-attack today. I am very sorry, feel free to yell at me in the support system. Okay, I'm going now to hopefully get the webmail up sometime tonight, there are a lot of backup files to copy over. I'm feeling a sudden deja vu to the worst day of my life from last week when the other drive failed. By Andrew Smales. 10:25 p.m. - Oct. 19, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- webmail The webmail server is having problems again today, which is really vexing because they put a whole new drive in it when it had problems last week. It looks like the new drive had some problems, so I'm waiting and waiting for them to get hardware people out to the NOC (they're super slow for some reason, I guess it doesn't help that it's sunday) and fix it. Super super sorry for this hassle, it's killing me worse than anyone, I keep calling and checking and calling and checking and explaining and mostly just being very agitated. I'll keep you updated, but if you want to be safe you could change your email forwarder to point to an alternate address and then tell me so in the web support system and then i'll reload the database so your mail goes there for now. I don't expect this to last much longer, but there is always the chance it could take a while so feel more than free to do that. Sorry about that! By Andrew Smales. 4:21 p.m. - Oct. 19, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- short note on webmail and banners 2 short notes: - There was a timing problem with the banner system today and a lot of banners got shown very fast, which isn't really fair, so if you had a banner running in the past day or so that seems to have stopped running pretty quickly, let me know which, how many views it was submitted for and when (using the web support system) and I'll look them up tonight and make adjustments. Sorry about that, it was a weird thing involvin a lot of sudden site traffic that made the banners get shown so fast, hence the abundance of the default "GOLD!" banners on right now. - Webmail users: If you have any subfolders you created in your webmail that don't show up right now, don't worry, they're there, I just am waiting for word on how to make them show up, the webmail program we use stores mail in an odd way and when I restored the mail the other day they didn't show up and I'm still waiting for word back from someone who worked on the mail system as to why. Sorry it's taking so long, everything is slow on the weekend. Okay that's all for now! What a lousy week! By Andrew Smales. 3:06 p.m. - Oct. 12, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- webmail note Just a note to supergold users that the webmail is temporarily down, we had a nasty equipment failure on the webmail server last night and I'm re-setting it up now. Don't worry, your mail is fine and backed up, it's just going to take an hour or two to get it all copied over and running again, sorry about that! This actually happened fairly early in the morning and I've been up since it happened cleaning up the mess. It was a fairly expensive problem overall too, so if anyone was thinking of buying a gold or supergold membership, today's the day haha! By Andrew Smales. 8:57 a.m. - Oct. 08, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- short downtime Sorry, the server was just down for about 7 minutes because they're doing some work on one of the database servers at the colocation place, and they took down the wrong frigging server. I just phoned frantically and finally got the guy to put the main one back up. So that's that. By Andrew Smales. 5:03 p.m. - Sept. 05, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- network problems for a few minutes Just a note, the server place is having some network issues right now, which is why the site was just inaccessible for some people for a few minutes. I've called them and they're working on it now, so should be fixed fairly soon I expect (hope). Sorry about that! By Andrew Smales. 6:18 p.m. - Aug. 24, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- mail update That stupid, stupid Sobig virus has swamped the mail server over the past few days, so that it's being really slow, and some notify lists have been getting delayed. I've just move the notifylist sender to a new server though and it's super-fast now and catching up on the backlog, and it shouldn't have problems from now on. I'm also moving the diaryland mail system to another fast new server which has also been eating my time, so I'm really behind on a lot of other stuff, sorry. Sammy is back from holiday any second now though so that'll ease a lot of the work off me I hope! New features still coming any time now, very very soon! By Andrew Smales. 12:34 p.m. - Aug. 22, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- way behind Just a short note too: Although the site was up during the power outage and I was able to log in enough to make sure everything was running and do small things, in general I wasn't able to get a ton done, especially on friday when the limited connectivity I had went out for most of the day, and the outage seems to have messed up the main computer I use (even with a surge protector, hmph), so that's slowing me down too. Anyhow, point being: I'm pretty behind now on everything (approving banners, etc.), so don't be extra mad when things take a bit longer for the next day or two, this is just one of those weeks where a bunch of things go wrong, and then more things go wrong, and then a few other things go wrong, etc. By Andrew Smales. 10:12 p.m. - Aug. 16, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- quick thing The power's off here in Toronto, but DiaryLand's servers aren't here, hence you reading this! Got a few emails mentioning surprise at us being up, figured I'd mention that. New news soon, several big new features coming. By Andrew Smales. 7:11 p.m. - Aug. 14, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- network thing Just had some network issues, I'm on the phone to the network place as I type this, but it looks like they had some issues with equipment at their location where the nameservers are, and that caused it. I'm having a load of equipment issues myself in the last 2 days and I'm stuck on a really really lousy slow computer this afternoon, so looking into all this is a pain, but I'm watching it and I'll update here if anything else happens (after I started this entry they told me the problem seems to be resolved, so that's good!) By Andrew Smales. 12:52 p.m. - Jul. 29, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- gold membership wish lists! Hi! A few quick notes! Thanks to everyone who posted about how they like the gold service as I mentioned in the last news entry, I really appreciate it, and encourage everyone to keep doing it haha, it really, really helps. Most people read tons and tons of diary pages every day and just come to the members area now and then, so having actual gold users saying they like the gold and supergold memberships is very helpful. Also, if you want a gold membership but for whatever reason can't buy it right now, I have whipped up a wish list page for you to link from your diary, and maybe a fan of your diary will buy you an upgrade! What a sweet gesture that'd be (HINT HINT, SUPER OBVIOUS HINT)! Anyhow, just make a link from your template to this url: http://members.diaryland.com/edit/wishlist.phtml?user=username (you can replace that username part with your actual username of course. Click here if you don't know how to make a link) and sit back and wait (or mention it in your entry, in case people don't notice right away!), and yeah, good times! This link also will work for people who already have gold or supergold, it'll let people upgrade you to supergold (if you're normal gold) or extend whatever you already have longer. Okay, that's all but I have more news tomorrow! By Andrew Smales. 12:29 a.m. - Jul. 25, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- short update! (updated below) About an hour ago there was a short time where if you added an entry, it didn't show up in your "edit/delete entries" page for a few minutes, that's fixed now, sorry if that affected you! I had to switch the database servers around just then to test out something, which is what caused it. Incidentally, the reason I had to check them out was somewhat related to some billing issues with the server place Diaryland is at, they sent me an invoice that was a bit high. They've corrected it, but there was still a pretty huge increase in bandwidth over the past 2 months, which is costing the site an extra, well a lot of money. And I mean a lot. This is mostly just due to a big influx of users signing up, which is great overall, but costs a bit more in bandwidth since a lot of users wait a month or two before upgrading to a gold or supergold membership, but their diaries are using bandwidth right away, if I explained that okay. So, I don't really want to scrounge here, but if you've been using Diaryland for a while and don't have a gold or supergold membership, I'd really appreciate if you'd consider signing up for one, you do get a bunch of extra functionality that makes using Diaryland more fun. Especially last month when the busy server messages were coming up a lot during peak times, people got very annoyed and wrote a lot of complaints in their entries, in email to me, in the tech support system, etc. Now that those errors are pretty much gone completely, noone has said anything, which I think means that everyone is back enjoying the hassle-free-ness of adding entries as a free member, and all I'm saying is, if you enjoy Diaryland enough to have gotten really mad when it was busy a lot, that's great, it's a compliment to the site really, but if you want to make sure the site stays smooth, as well as getting all the stuff that gold membership pays for, please do consider upgrading to gold or supergold. I am not usually this beggy, but after getting the unexpected extra bill today, it'd be pretty nice if let's say uhh.. 300 of you signed up for a year of gold or 6 months of supergold hahahha. Running a website rules! update: A few people who are already paying members asked what they could do to help, and really the best thing would just be, if you enjoy your gold membership, tell people. There is nothing that would help the site more than a bunch of people signing up for gold who don't have it, and if you mention to them now and then how handy the gold and supergold features are, that's the best thing really! A lot of people write me after signing up for gold or supergold and say very nice things, but I'm already sold on them haha, tell your other friends and readers and that'd be great! By Andrew Smales. 8:07 p.m. - Jul. 14, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Server overloading problems are gone! I'd just like to make that last update on this page official, I do have the server overloading issues pretty much licked. I have a bit more licking to do actually, at which point the issues will be positively dripping with licked-edness, but basically I have figured out what the main problem was where all of a sudden the server got really bad, it has to do with a sort of weird database config issue, combined with a hardware problem. Anyhow, the whole thing is pretty much fine now, and I'll keep fixing the tables that need to be fixed, and the message may pop up for very very brief periods now and then, but very rarely (weirdly, although the delay message has hardly been up in the last week or so, the couple of times it has, for about 5 minutes tops each time, I still get emails saying "I have been reloading for 2 hours and it doesn't work" .. stop fibbing haha, I have stats!). Anyhow, everyone who was inconvenienced and angered by this before can relax now, smooth sailing from here on in. Also happy July 4th to the american folks! I will have a pretty neat new feature for everyone later today or this weekend (depending on how many last minute bugs need to be sorted), keep your eyes peeled on this page! update: Oh! That reminds me, one other thing: A lot of people have been complaining about pop-up ads all over Diaryland lately, especially after I posted that news item mentioning how we don't use pop-ups. Well, it turns out that a lot of people use some tag-board service which has started sticking pop-up ads in their boards, and I guess noone really expects this and assumes it's Diaryland. This sort of sucks for me, since Diaryland is catching the hate for pop-ups, so I'm going to try and add a tag-board feature this weekend too for gold members. In the meantime though, yeah, it isn't us! By Andrew Smales. 1:12 p.m. - Jul. 04, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- good news! Okay, I haven't wanted to say anything and then have to retract it later, but for the last week I've been doing a bunch of alterations to the way the database servers are configured to lighten the load and prevent the "sorry, reload in a minute" messages for non-gold members, and I'm about halfway done the switches I need to make and so far tonight it's been great, the server load is way below a normal sunday night, which either means that there are just less people wanting to add entries, or that the changes are making a big difference. Once I finish all the changes things should be even better. I could have to come back later and go "oh uh, load was low for some other reason" but for once, the results I should get in theory are working out in reality and no new bottlenecks are popping up! By Andrew Smales. 10:06 p.m. - Jun. 29, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- random entry feature Hey, just a quick note on a new feature for gold and supergold members (sorry, would put a strain on the servers if everyone had it unfortunately): You can now add a random entry link to your diary that, when clicked, will take the reader to a random entry of yours. All you have to do is to link to http://members.diaryland.com/edit/random.phtml?user=yourusername and of course change that last bit to your actual username. This is something I've been meaning to add forever but 2 people asked about it today (which is crazy cause only a few people ever have, maybe 4 total, if that) and when I thought about it I realized I could add it pretty quickly, I think it took about 20 minutes or so. Handy! By Andrew Smales. 9:11 p.m. - Jun. 19, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- problems for new signups today If you signed up today (actually in the last few hours) and had any weird problems, they'll be gone in a minute. There was a problem where 2 of the database servers weren't synced up, but they're updating as I write this. Very fluky thing, but I would normally have caught this fast, but I was stuck out of town somewhere I had to turn my phone off for a while (in a funeral parlor actually), so poor Sammy was phoning me over and over with no luck. This may have also caused a few other problems with people who were already signed up, but those should fix themselves too (just stuff like if you changed your template but then added an entry and it used the old template, stuff like that). Okay so that's it, give it about another 10 or 15 minutes I think and it'll be 100% synced, but for most purposes everything is fine now, sorry about that! By Andrew Smales. 8:25 p.m. - Jun. 17, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2 quick notes Hey just a few random notes: 1. A lot of people around the internet are getting fraudulent emails that pretend they are from eBay or Paypal that say something like "we need to verify your information" and then have a form in the email to enter your address, password, etc. Apparently Diaryland people are getting these too, and since we take paypal, I'm worried that some people might get the wrong idea and think they're legit, so just remember, never enter your password or information into an email that claims to be from ebay or paypal or whoever, it's a trick. Sometimes they send you to a fake site that LOOKS like it's ebay or paypal but isn't, like it'll be http://[email protected] or whatever, so just watch yourself! Lots of tricks going around like this lately, nasty stuff! 2. Related: Sometimes I get people asking why I have added pop-up ads to Diaryland, and of course I haven't. The trick is that sometimes when you install software you download (especially P2P apps like Kazaa, etc.), they add extra crap to your computer that will do a variety of annoying things, like track your internet usage and send it back to their servers (stuff like Gator does this), pop up ads all over the place, etc. There is a program though, which is the greatest program ever, which will find this crap (called scumware or malware sometimes) on your computer and let you choose what to get rid of, and I very highly recommend you check it out by clicking here, the program is called Ad-aware, and if you follow the "download" link there, it'll take you to a page where you can try the free standard edition. The first time you get it, click the "check for updates" and it'll get the latest info and then when you run it, it'll find all the crappy scumware that's slowing your computer down and get rid of it. Okay, those are 2 news things on not-really-related- to-Diaryland-but-sort-of things! By Andrew Smales. 11:08 p.m. - Jun. 13, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- server update Hi! Okay, non-gold people are getting the "sorry, server overloaded right now"-type message a fair amount lately, especially tonight, and someone wrote me with some fairly technical (and good!) questions about database table optimization just now, and I thought I'd paste in the relevant part of my answer here to let everyone know what's going on. It's related to the ram problems that previously SEEMED to be fixed, and I really do think I'm close to the end of this problem. Anyhow, here is the excerpt: "Anyway, I've been really trying to nail down the problem for a while, assuming it was a DB thing I could optimize, but it turned out to my surprise that it's a disk I/O thing, basically the servers just don't have fast enough disks to handle all the data going through them at peak times. The add-entry stuff is what pushes most data through them, so limiting that is the only real option (plus by not letting people even write an entry, it prevents them from adding one and then getting a server error and losing it, which is 100 times more frustrating than writing it in notepad and having to add it later). So that's sort of good news because it means all I need to do is get more/faster disks or another server with faster disks, and that should be a snap except 2 things: 1. cost obviously, I'll have to get more really fast disks and the necessary raid controller stuff, but mostly: 2. the main thing is, the colocation place is currently still working on a bad memory problem, and I have no clue what is taking them so long. I can't really do any hardware upgrades until that's taken care of and I know these new servers really are okay and whatnot, and just the fact they're taking so long to get the memory issue fixed for good is scaring me and making me wonder if I should switch to somewhere else, it's getting to the point of being ridiculous. Assuming though that they fix that pretty soon, I can just get another server, stick in a bunch of really fast drives and the errors should go away, assuming there isn't anything I am missing, although at this point I don't think there is. " So there you go. Diaryland has been around for around 4 years or whatever now (and has 1057635 users as of the second I am writing this), and this is the kind of thing that never really popped up it's head before, previous bottlenecks that caused growing pains were mostly CPU related. The reason this one has taken so long to fix is in large part because it was hard to really diagnosis for sure, it seemed like it was a cpu or ram thing probably for a while, because of other issues. Anyway, sorry for the inconvenience, but just be a little more patient and it'll be fixed, I have a few things I can do now, I just can't do any right this second, until the whole ram issue is fixed up. By Andrew Smales. 9:30 p.m. - Jun. 09, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- fixed Okay, everything seems back and fine, the ram was defective apparently but it's replaced now. Years of reading and studying the works of Garfield led me to believe that things like this only happen on mondays, but I guess not. Is it time to rethink my views on lasagna too? Time for some soul-searching. By Andrew Smales. 3:45 p.m. - May. 23, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- update Okay, just an update: the server is almost ready, I think? The server guys didn't get back to me, and I was pinging the server and it was down for an hour, but then it turns out (techy nerd crap warning), just the secondary ethernet interface (which I was pinging) was down, but the server itself had been up for like 45 minutes. So I was getting all anxious and nervous about the server when in fact it was up, isn't that funny? HA HA HA so funny I could punch someone in the face. Maybe myself! Anyhow, I'm waiting on a call back to actually figure out if they fixed the ram or what. Oh and as i was writing this entry, they seem to have shut down the switch the 2nd database server (that was handling the entire site's load) was running on, causing the database to die for a minute. HILARIOUS! Running an internet site is SO MUCH FUN. By Andrew Smales. 3:16 p.m. - May. 23, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- down to half power for a few minutes Just a note if you're not a gold member and trying to add an entry right now but get the "overloaded!" form, it's just for a few minutes while the server place has one of the database servers shut down and is checking to see what's up with the memory situation (after the crash mentioned below, only half the memory was working, which is what I was referring to with the software comment below, I think it's an OS configuration thing maybe...). I'll update this as needed! By Andrew Smales. 2:14 p.m. - May. 23, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- server reboot hello hombres, the upgraded database server just crashed for some reason (I have the hardware people looking into that now at the server place), which caused a few problems on the site, most notably that recently added entries didn't show up in the edit/delete entries page right away. Anyhow, it's all fixed now and I'll see what the server guys say, cause something isn't quite right with the new server for some reason, yoinks! Hopefully it'll be a small fix, it looks like a software misconfiguration from what I can see. By Andrew Smales. 7:48 p.m. - May. 21, 2003 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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