The MacDeskBlog

I should have posted this days ago, but I completely spaced. MacDesktops.com email is down today (August 16th) due to a planned PG&E outage in our neighborhood. The power went out at 8:30AM Pacific time and was due to come back on at 2PM. Assuming that the power came back on when scheduled, the mail server is waiting for someone to turn it back on. So, if you sent something earlier today and received a bounce message, please resend it tomorrow.

I will be upgrading WordPress for http://macdesktops.com/weblog before next week. Previous upgrades have gone smoothly with just some brief cosmetic changes during the upgrade. If anything goes wrong, I’ll rollback and try again later.

I accidentally let the domain expire. When I realized that on Tuesday, I promptly renewed. The corrected DNS took several hours or perhaps overnight to propagate, but it should be fully refreshed by now. If the site still is not working from some of your computers or locations, just give some more time to refresh.

I’m very sorry for the inconvenience,

Ryan

MacDesktops.com will be offline Sunday morning from approximately 11:15PM PST Saturday night until approximately 4:00AM PST Sunday morning due to a power outage at the primary hosting provider.

See DreamHost Status » Blog Archive » Planned Power Outage for detail if you are interested.

I heard back from DreamHost, and it turns out that these errors are showing up because of memory limits applied to all accounts.

I have two options. First, I could decrease the memory footprint of the site. Well, that would be a huge undertaking which I’m not up for. Second, I could add another server and share the load. That will require some setup time and testing effort which I’m up for but not necessarily right now.

So, if you get an Internal Server Error, then just wait a few seconds and try again. I’ll try to have a second web server sharing the load some time within the next month or so.

I see that the server is occasionally returning Internal Server Errors since January 10th. I just submitted a support ticket regarding this.

If you receive one of these errors, there is probably nothing wrong with your request. Just try again.

I hope that Dreamhost will be able to diagnose and correct the issue soon.

MacDesktops finds itself with an unusually short submission queue right now. I am currently processing the last of the August submissions, and scheduling them to run in December. While digital photographs of landscapes, flowers, sunsets, etc continue to come in steadily, other categories have seen a significant decline. In particular, Apple logos and Mac-themed desktops have been sparse, as have Movies, Music, Portraits, Animation, Illustration, Games.

So, if you’ve been thinking about putting together some desktop pictures, or have some which you’ve already made and would like to share, this is a great time to send them in.

Historically, the submission queue has run as long as 10-12 months. I think the last time the queue was only 4 months was back in 1999 or so.

My personal theories about why submissions have declined are: the larger resolution requirements (currently 1600×1200 or larger) inhibit some artists; the server problems this year and last year had an impact on performance and may have discouraged submissions; I neglected MacDesktops over the past couple of years while life and work required more attention. Though the resolution requirements will only continue to rise, I think the other two issues are much improved now.

UPDATE: You are connected to the new server. Site preferences can be saved here.

I am cutting over to the new server now. Site preferences saved on the old server after this point will not migrate to the new server. There should be no downtime associated with this cutover. This post will be different on the new server.

I am cutting over to the new server. Changes to site preferences made on the old server after this point will be lost.

UPDATE: I encountered a small problem during the migration. I need to change a bit of code in the site for it to work at DreamHost. So, the migration is postponed until I get that straightened out.

I followed my friend John Engler’s advice, albeit almost a year later, and signed up with DreamHost. I haven’t decided yet whether or not to stick with them. Here’s what I’m weighing …

Pros:
• Designated MySQL server
• One-Click installations of WordPress and phpBB, which I already use, and a couple of other products which I may start to use
• Transparency about downtimes and service impacts
• High disk and bandwidth quotas for a low price
• Pretty quick responses from support

Cons:
• Doesn’t support MySQL database replication
• Doesn’t support DNS slave setup, and some non-configurable entries in DNS management interface are incorrect, so their DNS is unusable for me
• Downtimes and service impacts appear to be fairly common
• Linux
• Pretty inflexible responses from support

Unknowns:
• Performance under load
• Database performance
• Implementation effort required to replicate MySQL via scripting

So, that’s where I am right now. If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them here on the blog.