The MacDeskBlog

Thanks to M. Breez for pointing out a bug in the site. The main page and using the “images from previous week” links should now display seven days of images every time. It was limited to the most recent 14 images which trimmed off an image for 15 picture weeks and displayed less than half of the images for those crazy 30 image weeks back in 2000 (April 5th if that relative link doesn’t jump you back far enough). And if you’re browsing back really far through the archives, you shouldn’t ever receive the same results for previous week searches. You may wonder how that could have happened, so I’ll tell you. If the “images from previous week” search finds no pictures, it checks the prior week for up to 28 days in total. The link was only changing by 7 days even if the search went back 14, 21 or 28 days. So, you could get the same results up to four consecutive times. Now, if the search goes back 28 days, the link will go back 28 days too.

Please let me know if think you find a new bug in this.

Ryan

After a very long spell without them, I put ads back on the site. I removed them for performance reasons. I hope that the new implementation will avoid the performance problems caused by the previous implementation.

Please support the site by supporting the sponsors.

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 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.

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’m sorry for 12-24 hour downtime Thursday night/Friday. Someone set up a new server using the same IP address, which triggered some serious problems. Then, to make matters worse, I had an obscure misconfiguration in the server which took me about 10 hours to identify. Ultimately, I had to switch an ‘off’ to ‘on’ in a Mac OS X Server specific configuration file (”/etc/mysqlManager.plist”) which I didn’t know about. You learn something new every day. And twice as much when something blows up in your face.

Fundamentally, I didn’t test the server thoroughly enough before I put it into production. I should have uncovered this problem then. Oh well.

A special thanks goes to Eric Swinson of Visual Seed who is recovering from surgery yet still managed to mobilize resources to identify and resolve the IP conflict. Eric provides the Mac mini which hosts the site. The image server didn’t have any problems, and for that I also thankful to Eric at Import GSM.

Again, my apologies for the downtime. I hope not to repeat that for quite some time.

I upgraded the test server to the latest version of WordPress this morning. The only significant challenge I faced during the upgrade was caused by some frame busting javascript in my template. It took me a little while to find my way to the WordPress Support forums. Once I did, it didn’t take long to find threads from people with the same problem and the included solution. While I was looking around, I found a new thread buster plugin to replace my(?) old javascript, figured out how to finally get the sub-categories nested beneath the categories (from looking at the Blix theme) and figured out how to enable the calendar in the sidebar. The sub-categories fix was actually necessary, as the category list in my custom theme broke during the upgrade. The category list worked when I switched to the Blix theme, which also happens to have the nested category list that I’ve been wanting.

Then I spent some time trying out the site to make sure that nothing else was broken. I haven’t found any problems.

All of that went so smoothly that I decided to just go ahead and upgrade production this evening.

It’s nice to be a week ahead of schedule.

I know I just wrote a couple of days ago that the mailing lists would be replaced next weekend. However, I just noticed that announcements appear to have stopped over a week ago. Rather than trying to figure out why and fix it, I’m just going to cutover immediately. If you were subscribed to one of the old lists, you will receive an invitation to subscribe to the corresponding new list. You must respond in order to subscribe. You may need to check your Junk Mail folder for the invitation.

Invitations went out Sunday night. If you do not receive an invitation or want to change addresses, you may subscribe yourself at http://mail.macdesktops.com/mailman/listinfo.

I just updated DNS to cutover the web server to the new server. If that goes smoothly, then I’ll cutover the database too.

Soon after that, I will switch the announcement lists over to MailMan server distribution lists. What this means for you is that if you are currently on one of the announcement lists, you will receive an invitation to join the new replacement email list. If you do nothing, you will be removed from the list. I think that bears repeating. If you do not respond to the list invitation, you will not receive any announcements after cutover to the new lists. I added a note to the bottom of the current announcements. Next weekend, when I cutover, I will send one last message to the old lists with instructions on how to subscribe to the new lists.

Switching back to the new server, I have received no comments about the new server. Historically, some of you have sent in positive or negative about server changes. I’m not quite sure how to interpret the current silence. You might be tempted to think that I’m exaggerating about no comments; that I really mean I have received few comments. Even I am surprised to say that by no comments, I mean zero. In fact, mail in general has been pretty light over the past few weeks. I hope it’s not disappearing or something. Submissions dropped off for a while too. Happily, they appear to be picking up again.

Changes in the works:
1. move database writes and ad reads to new server - this weekend
2. transition mail lists to MailMan - next weekend
3. update WordPress for weblog - Presidents’ Day weekend
4. move into new house - weekend of the 24th
5. resurrect the statistics server - March
6. major site changes - March/April

UPDATE: The database cutover is complete. WordPress is a bit screwed up on the administration side. I may need some downtime to fix it.