prince.org staff blog

Yes, well, I finally got fed up with the creaky old composing window, and it’s “web 1.0″ way of doing things… so I added some pretty cool features, I think.

Now when you compose new messages (replies, new topics), you get a snazzy new WYSIWYG editor, which lets you do bold, italics, lists, etc. all quite easily and in a more foolproof way. Less previewing, more concentrating on what you really want to say!

As with any changes, there will likely be bugs. Let me know any you find, probably the easiest way is via the forum posting (but responding here is OK too.)

p.s. I also added an autosave draft feature… every minute, whatever you’re composing will get saved. If you accidentally close your browser window before submitting, or your browser crashes, or whatever, you can come back later and pick up where you left off as of the last autosave. You’ll get notices on the forum overview and thread-reading pages if there’s a draft for that area, waiting for you. I hope this helps everyone write long(er) / more thoughtful messages with peace of mind!

We’ve added the ability to ‘share’ prince.org threads via Twitter, Google Buzz, and Facebook, all with just a couple of clicks… as well as ‘like’ a thread on Facebook. The new tools are just above the start of the thread on those pages. See the highlighted image below:

Let us know how you like it, if it works for you, where else you think we could benefit from social integration, etc.

Heads-up, we’ll have a (hopefully!) short outage in the next 12-72 hours for database maintenance. I’m hoping to do it late tonight Pacific Time (i.e., around 11pm tonight) but it’s possible I might not get around to it until over the weekend. Don’t be alarmed, don’t be afraid… we’ll be back shortly when it happens!

And no, I won’t be putting the “crazy chatroom that broke in 10 minutes” thing up while the DB is down, like last time

Thanks to posts on the site-specific forum, I was alerted to a couple of org issues, which have now been resolved.

First, that the “short URLs” in Tweets were not always working; specifically, if they had a “+” sign in them, they ended up redirecting to the homepage instead of the relevant thread. This should now be fixed, an oversight on my part.

Second, it was pointed out that sometimes threads got Tweeted that really didn’t seem worthy. I examined the criteria being used, and indeed, saw a flaw; it was possible for posts to  be considered ‘hot’ and tweeted, in some cases with very few replies, but many views. This isn’t quite right, and so this has been adjusted so that a minimum number of replies are still required, regardless of the number of views.

Thanks to BartVanHemelen for reporting the issues, and to the mods for calling the threads to my attention. If you see something wrong, please do post about it in the prince.org site discussion forum!

I’m going to take another shot at moving the .org to the faster server over the holiday, probably starting Sunday night. Expect some downtime! You’ve been warned

Thanks for your understanding!

Ben

Just a quick update for y’all… things can move at a snail’s pace around here when it requires my attention to get completed. About a year ago, we asked for people who were interested in helping out with moderating, to apply, and we got a ton of responses. After much discussion among the existing mods, we settled on extended an offer to a few people. Out of those, a few responded positively in email. And then… I never followed up on the last bits of work!

Partly this was because I was so swamped with work, partly it was due to worries over there being little-to-no good way to help get these folks up and running, partly it was just laziness/oversight on my part. The mod team has been asking nicely that I finish this up, and finally today I at least made one step in the right direction, by adding Mars23 on as a mod in several of the highest-traffic forums. He’s been on the org for years, and has been a considerate and helpful member of the community, and I’m excited to have him now help out as a mod — joining the ranks of the few, the proud, the underappreciated prince.org moderators

Anyhow, there’s a “congrats” thread over here if you’d like to say something there, too!

Sorry for the unavailability this morning — turns out I (d’oh!) didn’t update the credit card on file at the hosting provider and they turned off the traffic. All fixed, paid in full, happiness again  

Whew. That was fun (not!)

My apologies for our outage for the last 5 days. Not that it was my fault, but I still feel bad about it. I know many of you have missed your “org fix” as one person wrote to me in email. In case you didn’t get the mail I sent out (some people seem not to have — reminder, check the email address the org has on file for you!), we were down starting last Saturday night, due to an electrical fire and subsuquent explosion (!) where our servers are hosted, in Texas, at theplanet.com. This was a catastrophic failure for their power systems, and while things like a normal power cut, would not have caused any problem, an explosion destroying much of their underground wiring, certainly did Over 9,000 servers were affected, approximately 7,000 customers, including, of course, our beloved org. Fortunately, no one was hurt in the fire and explosion!

The folks at theplanet.com worked round the clock for days to restore power, and finally restored it to all the servers about a day ago. The org wouldn’t come right back up, however, and after some manual intervention on their part, we were able to return to service about 6 hours ago. My thanks to the good folks at The Planet, and I really appreciate everyone’s patience while we waited for them to slog through the repairs. It’s great to be back!!

Two months ago when I started working on moving us to a new server, I had hoped to have everything done within a week. I spent about a week’s worth of effort on getting everything set up and installed, etc., and still wasn’t ready for the crucial last set of steps to actually move the entire site over. I’m going to be working on that some more this week, hopefully even tonight, and try to get us onto the faster equipment by the end of May.

Please understand if the site is down for a while, and it may also take time for your ISP to update their DNS cache (i.e., to point to the new site’s address). Best case, that takes only a few minutes, but worst case, a couple of days.

Anyhow, I’ll try to have meaningful messages posted up on the old site as I make progress.

Ben

All:
Sometime Sunday night (I’m not exactly sure when I’ll get around to this, but probably after 9PM Pacific time), I will be taking the org down for a little while for database maintenance, and one of the critical steps towards moving the site to new (faster!) server.  I expect the downtime to only be about an hour. I will try to have a “maintenance” page up during the process, as well.

If all goes well, within a week or so we should be all migrated to the new machine, however, which I think will be a noticeable speed improvement, so it’s all for a good cause!

Thanks for your understanding,
Ben