The New Zealand labour movement used to have its own newspaper. A group of us thought that now might be a good time for it to be digitally reborn: The Standard v2.0.
Yesterday’s site issues were due to a combination of inadequate Expires (causing a lot more files being transmitted) and the web-crawlers grabbing the updated site.
It blew out the memory. I’ve limited the simultaneous sessions to prevent that until I get more RAM. Bandwidth usage for this month is indicating this would be a wise precaution to speed page delivery, even without the site updates.
I’ve done a few tweaks to the front page of the site to speed finding the current state of play and balance out the blogroll. Because of the volume of posts and comments, I’ve increased the size of the latest of both. This means you will be able to see who is talking across posts more easily.
The access to the older posts are now inside ‘Archives’ at the top menu.
There are a number of features that I’ll be turning on over the next week or so as things settle down. But none of those should structurally change the site. The back-end changes are quite effective.
Let me know of the gripes and suggestions either as comments in this post or e-mail (but avoid the political sniping). I will do what is feasible, while keeping a close eye on that bandwidth and memory. Hopefully this is the last of the upgrade issues apart from the disappearing IE comments box that I still have to fix.
I upgraded the site tonight. There have been a lot of security fixes since we pushed a test site together in August 2007. It was only meant to be a trial (as I keep saying plaintively to the posters), and it sort of got away on us.
This version is meant to be much more secure, and considerably faster. But I’m confident that the post and comments will ensure that doesn’t show up on your side. Verbiage seems to fill the space available - especially in an election year.
The biggest visible differences are in the Dashboard for the posters and anyone who logs in. That is because I wanted the site to look much the same, at least for now. Getting the similarity has deprived me of some needed sleep because I needed to move hacks to css.
I know about the missing selection of posts in the top right, but let me know in here if anyone sees any problems. It seems to work in all of my browsers. But the first set of comments in here will be a final test for common browsers.
Cheers
Lynn.
Update: Internet Explorer version 6 has problems with the layout on the reCaptcha. This will not be fixed until tuesday. If you are using Internet Explorer before version 7, you should upgrade or move to a better browser anyway - help your developers.
I’d suggest Firefox or Safari. Both confirm to the standards a lot better than any Internet Explorer.
A reader pointed out a set of hidden spam links that had attached themselves to the footer of the site.
I’d noticed them previously and thought that I’d corrected them (see comment). But they turned up again. Turns out it was from an interesting flaw in the website, and was being inserted from outside. I’ve hardened up the problem area(s) and I’ll monitor for a repitition.
It is likely that I’ll need to take the site down for a few hours in the early morning on Sunday to do some further maintenance. So don’t get too surprised to get a unexpected screen around that time.
There was a reboot on the server last night for some reason about 20 hours ago, and the database process failed to start. The cron job that was meant to restart the process didn’t work.
It would happen on a day when I was rushing around with a dead cellphone and no net access.
I’ll have a look at what happened and see how we prevent this from happening again.
Cyber-Santa came a little late to The Standard this year but we’re certainly not complaining - evidently we’ve got a New Year’s present instead.
He and the techno-elves have moved us to a brand spanking new server cluster that should give us plenty of breathing room and make those pesky traffic congestion problems we were having a thing of the past.
Seriously though, it wasn’t really Santa. Just like James Bond apparently we have our very own M and it’s him we have to thank instead.
We’re still secretly hoping for the pimped out Austin Aston Martin but this should tide us over in the meantime. Thanks M!
Well I didn’t get my pony but I hope everyone’s Christmas was as enjoyable as mine.
I’m just finishing some peanut butter on toast, by my reckoning the first non turkey- or ham-based meal I’ve had in five days. I’m hoping that it won’t trigger some sort of auto immune rejection reaction.
Things are likely to be pretty quiet here on The Standard for the next week or so, though I suspect people will be posting from time to time. I thought now might be a good time to thank you all for your support over the last few months.
Our first post was on August the 15th 2007. It’s been exciting for all of us to watch the rather humbling growth of this blog from tens to hundreds to thousands of daily visitors - of whom you’re probably one. It’s all of you that help to make this site a success - so thanks.
A particular thank you to all those who participate in the comments section - you’ve helped to build a community, and one that we’re going to be doing our best to help you grow even further in the new year. We’ve got new hardware sorted to cope with the site’s steadily increasing traffic and we’re kicking around a few other ideas we’ll hope you’ll like - more on this as it develops.
Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and thanks again from all of us here at The Standard.
So the Herald links to us from the front page of their website this afternoon, and the resulting traffic knocks out our server. Bugger. We’re back online now, but I guess the moral of the story is we’re going to have to start paying for it like the big boys do. Did I say bugger already?
Apologies for my silence, I’ve been having a Microsoft Word nightmare. When mail merge would work, the printer wouldn’t; when the printer would work, Excel wouldn’t, and so on…
All sorted now… Clippy was an arse. Here he is trying to redeem himself:
That’s why we’ve just installed “Share This” - a blog plugin that should make it easier for you to share our tasty content with your friends (and the world).
As soon as we put up a contact form you’ll be able to tell us if it works for you (or not).
In the meantime try it out - to share a post you like, just click “Share This” below the post. Then it’s up to you - either send it to your favourite social bookmarking site or pass it on by trusty email…
Yesterday’s site issues were due to a combination of inadequate Expires (causing a lot more files being transmitted) and the web-crawlers grabbing the updated site.
