more site stuff
Submitted by srlinuxx on Sat, 05/27/2006 - 22:28.
Well, just a short sweet post. That other server was finally brought back online at 8:pm my time after being down since 3:ish am. That's almost 17 hours. They did not answer my email this time, but the first time it happened, they answered my email within 90 minutes and had the site back up shortly after that.
I took the opportunity to test upgrading drupal to 4.7 then 4.7.1 and it was much easier than the upgrade from 4.5.8 to 4.6.6 (now 4.6.7). So you know what that means! Yep, I'm gonna be bring tuxmachines down sometime in the near future, probably tonight whiles traffic is low, and do the upgrade. It really didn't take long to get the basic functionality back, so we won't be down long.
Some modules I use aren't available for 4.7 and I'd not be too interested in upgrading except that site caching seems to be working again. That is a big plus for us, especially if are gonna stay here on the slow dsl line.
Had tektonic written and said they had id'd the problem and it shouldn't happen again, I'd sure liked to have given them another chance. 
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Drupal Upgrade
It took a little longer to do the upgrade to 4.7 here than on the debian server for some reason. The update script failed a time or two, but it finally came around.
The poll module that broke with the last security update is still broke. Well, it's not really broke, its just changed permissions on it or something where one has to log in to vote despite the permission settings I set. That kinda annoys me.
And even when it does show up, the spacing is ungawdly large making it take up half the the page length in the column. I hate drupal.
But cache is working again and that was the most important thing. If anyone runs across any other little bugs or broken links, whatever, send me some feedback.
Thanks for everyone's patience as we've been messing around with the site this month. I return to classes at the end of this week, so things should get back to normal around here.
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You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?
Missing some old features, missing some of our guests today ?
Right now, the home page is cleaner, not as busy as the old format? Maybe too simple?
re: Missing some old features
Right now, the home page is cleaner, not as busy as the old format? Maybe too simple?
Well, I pulled the news aggregator blocks to possibly help with load times, they are still being pulled in and are listed under News Aggregator.
The poll modules, a core drupal module mind you, is sorta broke. I don't like it's current behavior so I pulled it as well.
Private messages is still there, it just seems to have lost its menu item as well as the hook at comments - which was working this morning. If you get an email saying you got a private message, you can still get there.
I had to disable subscription notifications cuz it went nuts and started sending out emails to almost everyone in the database everytime I posted a new story link. My apologizes to the folks who got spammed to death by me this morning.
I think the search feature is still screwed as well. The trip_search we had for a while isn't available for 4.7 and the core module appears to be still buggy.
And yeah, my visits have went way down since starting to mess with the site so much and moving around and stuff. And well, I ain't been putting out the original content either due to messing around with the site itself so much too. And it's a holiday weekend as well. But we may never get our folks back.
But drupal sucks. I mean it's decent once you get it setup and going, but upgrading is a disaster and always always you lose features and break stuff. The developers just drop features cuz they don't feel like working on it anymore or think there's a lack of interest in that feature. Every upgrade breaks something! Even small security patches. And community module developers are under no obligation to update their modules for each new release, so we lost a few cool mods like smileys.
I'm frustrated.
BTW, tektonic finally emailed me at 1:15pm today to let me know my server was back online. I realize it's a holiday weekend tho. They didn't offer any explanation or assurances it's unlikely to happend again.
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You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?
re: Missing some old features
Well, we're getting closer. The subscriptions bug has been worked around so that only folks who actually subscribed to something should be receiving notifications.
The smileys module in cvs worked with only a quick hack (or 3).
The search feature seems to be working now. It took 100 cron jobs for it to index - which was the problem right after upgrade. It should find stuff now.
Private messages is still messed up pretty bad. Lot's of bug reports and many confusing patches. We'll have to wait on that one.
And the poll module is still unusable and ugly. My posts and bug reports are going ignored on this issue. It may be a security feature, but it's an unreasonable one if that's the case. Anonymous must be allowed to vote. I'm testing some 3rd party poll modules in the meantime and although luck hasn't been on my side yet, I'm hopeful.
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You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?
A quick look at the other popular sites is a major feature?
Maybe we can add more websites on quick look feature. You could pull them in on an old desktop computer, and post them on the server in the wee hours of the day by cron jobs?
First, we have to bring back all the quests we had? Other people can have their excuses, but once is enough?
Major problem of lost guests participation ?
I am going to restart the search engines. We may have lost them, when we switched to subdomain. I put in Vista and Debian, and no response from search engines?
They did lose the feeds, crawler will now pick tuxmachines.org up in a day or two. I searched and tuxmachines is not yet showing up.
Footnote:
We were 15 guests about a year ago, we are now 42 guests without search engines. With search engines and topic "64 bit computations", we hit 471 guests, our peak performance for a very short duration. Knowledge about Vista is very scarce, we hit about 150 guests.
re: Major problem of lost guests participation
I am going to restart the search engines. We may have lost them, when we switched to subdomain. I put in Vista and Debian, and no response from search engines?
They did lose the feeds, crawler will now pick tuxmachines.org up in a day or two. I searched and tuxmachines is not yet showing up.
Dang that's a bummer. I appreciate your efforts very much.
Footnote:
We were 15 guests about a year ago, we are now 42 guests without search engines. With search engines and topic "64 bit computations", we hit 471 guests, our peak performance for a very short duration. Knowledge about Vista is very scarce, we hit about 150 guests.
Hmm, you keep up with it better than I do.
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You talk the talk, but do you waddle the waddle?
Subdomain firewall often shuts off search engine feeds ?
The problems of webhosting is that webmasters want to shut down the firewall to prevent denial of service caused by feeds from search engines. You have to buy a registered domain name to get search engine to propagate your website popularity.
So, its best and cheaper to go with 10 mbits per second cable service to improve the bandwidth(around $33/month) and use your own website.
With ARRS already having the capability to go 1 gbit per second, cable modem will improve very logically and fast as cable companies invest beyond last mile with ARRS headends.
I own ARRS(Nasdaq) stock.
Google back yesterday now Yahoo and MSN today ?
Google does about 65 guests.
Yahoo(10,000 BSD programmers) and MSN(Microsoft's 25000 programmers) may do up to the rest of the 150 guests.
Just now we are finally back to 85 guests.
Had to submit directly, instead of using submit free services(more harm than good).
I will try to do two comments a days; if you select 5 hot news and five yesterday's news on home page. Then, we can change format for more opportunities. If we have too much news, we will not be as good as CNN headliners.
Too much news is like too many cooks ? Open letter to editor ?
The diversion from diffused news sources send our guest numbers down to 32 from 85 peaked recently.
IBM people are not our customers because of their customers are the IT budget people for the next year's budget for IBM. IBM customers pay $150/hr to get IBM instructors to learn how to run computers, keystroke by keystroke(keep the customers ignorant). IBM buys software from RedHat and Suse.
Our customers are Linux developers. Large and small distros. Software news, distro interviews, and software development trends are meat on the table. Software popularity is news indeed here.
We have to be very sensitive to guest numbers on the site especially editorial content(news sources such as distroWatch, 500 potential distros as (even paid) customers, of which IBM is not one of them).
Building article contributor numbers are more difficult because of the format of Drupal. Which is not extensive on the forums(We have to attract more people to our forums with more subject matters? not on individual distros, but which is usable?), and comments are listed only 10 on the home page.
A few key comments are all Drupal can handle. So comments have to have keywords which are sensitive daily(may have to be selected for display?).
Keep up the good work, thanks. I will resubmit our site back on the search engines. Not getting back to the old home page is losing free(not paid) customers?