System Announcements

[Sasha Pachev]

Due to recent performance problems the Hot Discussions and Lone Faithful boxes have been temporarily disabled until I implement those features in a way that does not impact performance. Some of you may have noticed the system outage around 1:30 PM MST. I believe it was caused by the inefficient implementation of those two, which make the server hurt if hit two frequently.

Update: found the cause of the system outage. A bot named DotBot from http://www.dotnetdotcom.org/ came to crawl our site and it had a bug, an infinite loop of some kind. So it did rapid fire requests on the same URL over a fast link. It managed about 200 requests per second. This unfortunately was more than our server could handle on that particular request. To prevent something like this from happening in the future I added a bandwidth throttling module to our web server and configured it to throttle voracious clients.

Update: Hot Discussions and Lone Faithfuls are back. Blog listing (show_blogs.php) has a new feature of searching by blog/web name/nickname, as well as Not Update Within. Course Tool has been updated, details at

http://sasha.fastrunningblog.com/blog-A-M-Talked-to-Curt-last-night-and-reali/08-08-2008.html

[Jon Allen]

Bummer.  Hope they get fixed- I especially like the Hot Discussions.

[Adam R Wende]

Sasha, I did notice. Glad you found the bug.
Another question concerning computer problems and the such. What type of back-up system do we have? Is there a way to have a local back-up of our data "just in case". I've almost completely switched over to the blog from my hand written journals and sometimes have the concern of what happens in the event of a server crash?
I noticed the "export all" function for the data. However it does not keep the formating. Not being computer savvy is there a way to have the export format the same as the view for daily view? If not I can just cut and paste out.

[Sasha Pachev]

Export All is about all you've got for local backup. I run a daily backup as well. To get the formatting  you desire you will have to learn some computer skills. However, if you delete an entry or a whole bunch, but you have your Export All backup, I'll be able to restore it from it if other forms of backup become unavailable.

[Adam R Wende]

Thanks Sasha. You should start a computer programming blog as well. I feel like I would be the equivalent of the walk a mile every other day on it though...

[Sasha Pachev]

New feature - if you are logged in you can now edit or delete the comments that are identified as yours. If a comment is tied to your URL, it is considered yours. One side effect of the feature (admittedly not planned) is that if you find that somebody posted a comment and identified himself as you, you can edit his comment and change the owner.

Now you have one more reason to properly identify yourself when commenting.

[Tom]

Sasha thanks for the edit/delete comment feature.

Along the same lines....how hard would it be to add a feature where we could also delete comments entered on our own blog by someone else? Just thinking of those rare cases where perhaps someone posts something dopey or irritating and you want to blast the comment off to the NULL bucket.

[Sasha Pachev]

Not hard, will do it on the next round of code updates.