The MacDeskBlog » site maintenance

MacDesktops 10 April 1998 – 15 October 2011

Ryan Walker — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 04:30:29 +0000

Well folks, it is time for me to declare victory and move on.

When I started MacDesktops in April of 1998, Apple Computer was going out of business for 10 years if you believed the pundits and analysts. Today, Apple Inc is the highest valued technology company in the world (maybe the highest valued US company period depending up the time and day). In 1998, Mac users were an oppressed minority, struggling to keep our toe holds at work. Today, Mac users are not questioned about our choice of platform. In 1998, Mac users had to go to Mac news web sites to find out about new products. Today, Apple Inc gets weeks of headlines in every major newspaper leading into and trailing out of each announcement. Authors mention Apple in articles just to get page views. In 1998, Apple Computer (re)hired Chiat-Day as their advertising agency. C-D brought us the Think Different campaign, the early iMac campaigns, and the first iPod campaigns. Their messages were heartening, cute and frequently funny. Their ads made for great desktop pictures. Today, I have no idea who makes Apple’s ads. They’re simple and elegant, but ultimately boring.

For the first decade, I was excited to be providing this service. For the past couple of years, I’ve been phoning it in. Submissions have dropped off precipitously over the past two years. I lost my statistics server for the site at least 5 years ago and never replaced it, so I don’t even know how many of you still visit. I expect that you number several thousand now compared to hundreds of thousands back around the turn of the century.

So, I am ceasing updates to MacDesktops. I plowed through the backlog and filled the queue through October 15th.

MacDesktops will remain up as an archive, with the homepage showing a vertical tasting of pictures over the years from the current day.

I hope you enjoy these final installments.

Preferences fixed

Ryan Walker — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 21:17:12 +0000

I found the culprit, a missing apostrophe from my last addition of resolutions. Preferences should be working again. Please let me know if you encounter any further problems.

Preferences problems

Ryan Walker — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 15:56:46 +0000

I’ve received a few reports of problems with people’s preference settings being forgotten and being unable to reset them. I hope to resolve this within the next few days.

27″ iMac resolution added

Ryan Walker — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:22:43 +0000

You may have noticed that I added 2560×1440 resolutions for 27″ iMacs recently. I noticed a bug in one of my Photoshop scripts today which messed up that resolution for some pictures. I just recreated and replaced the defective files. By default, new resolutions are turned on for everybody. If you don’t need this new resolution and don’t want it displayed, you can turn it off in your Preferences.

Are resolutions missing that you want? If so, let me know with a comment below or an email to feedback.

Reconfiguration complete

Ryan Walker — Thu, 16 Sep 2010 19:26:05 +0000

I’ve finished with my planned server configuration changes. Hopefully, the site should be stable now. You may notice that pictures now download from two different servers, images.macdesktops.com and images2.macdesktops.com. The only noticeable side effect of this is that 50% of the time links to JPEGs you have already viewed will look like you haven’t viewed them before (blue links vs red links, for example).

If you encounter any further problems, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Server problem likely

Ryan Walker — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 20:13:42 +0000

It looks like the server hung today. I’m investigating. Additional configuration changes are likely over the next day or two. Additional downtime is possible. I apologize for the inconveniences.

Image server fixed

Ryan Walker — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 12:16:10 +0000

It looks like my configuration changes yesterday were faulty. I apologize for the unplanned outage. Everything looks solid now. If you encounter any further problems, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Special thanks to Rene for alerting me to the problem.

Updates from Bonaire

Ryan Walker — Sun, 23 May 2010 21:09:48 +0000

My wife started a blog for us at BonaireAdventures to share what we’re up to down in Bonaire. I promised some updates here which will still be forthcoming after everything gets resolved with my former employer.

Mail server cutover

Ryan Walker — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:20:11 +0000

The mail server for MacDesktops.com is being cutover right now. I think that I should receive all mail sent during the cutover, though some will be delayed.

New announcement lists

Ryan Walker — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:25:43 +0000

I just finished configuring the new announcement lists on Dreamhost. If you were subscribed to any of the announcement lists, you should have received a confirmation email from the new list on Dreamhost. If you don’t see it, then please check your Spam/Junk folder to see if it was filtered.

If you do not click the confirmation link in the email or if you did not receive one, you will stop receiving announcements.