...more recent posts
I've added accesskey access to the navigation bars on all pages here. That means you can use control+ a key (or alt+ a key) to access the navigation bar items. So, for instance, pressing control+p is like clicking on [post]. Control+e is [editpage]. Control+u is [upload].
Let me know if it doesn't work in your browser. Pretty big time saver if you get use to it.
Just woke up to find the site down again. I am still not sure why mySQL is having this intermittent problem. It ran so well for years. The only thing I can think is that maybe as our hard drive becomes very close to full we are causing problems in some cache system. But that is pretty speculative.
Does anybody have any sense of when it went down? I think I saw it up around midnight.
Not that this would be of interest to anyone, but I made a web interface for the output of a mysql show status command. Despite the two recent outages, and despite the fact that none of our numbers here would be impressive to anyone who really knows anything, I am nonetheless constantly amazed at how much information the database serves.
Here is a short explanation of the different variables.
Another outage today. Worse this time, as all sites on the server were inaccessible. I'm sure my few customers are very pleased they hosted with me!
I don't know exactly what was wrong. But I strongly suspect this was the same MySQL problem. Somewhere there is a script that is (or scripts that are) connecting the MySQL, but then not releasing the connection when they are done. And with enough requests this eventually results in too many connections to the database.
Probably those requests would time out eventually and everything would start working on it's own, but rebooting the server made this happen right away.
Hopefully no one was mid post when this happened.
I am going to try to get to the bottom of this. I will keep you all posted.
Quick database outage. Looks like the same thing that happened a week or so ago. Not a big deal (just have to restart the mysql demon,) but obviously annoying. I'm trying to figure out if there is something more fundamental that is breaking down. I'm thinking possibly this has to do with running low on disk space.
The site was down for a while today. I'm not sure exactly how long. The server was fine, but the database was returning a "too many connections" error which was almost certainly not the result of actually having too many connections. Sorry for the outage.
I can't figure out what is going on. /sync works, but it doesn't seem like it does. I mean, when you use it to sync files that have been FTP'd it actually does it's job, but the script just hangs, apparently not doing what it should. I am trying to fix this but haven't had much luck yet.
But until I do it is still useable. Just /sync like you would expect, wait for a few moments just to be safe, and then you can stop the page from loading. Then go to either /music or /image and you should see the files in their correct place.
The front end of the [image] system is now updated. I have rushed this just slightly (what else is new) because I've spent way too much time on it and I have to get going on several other things. So once again I am leaving it up to you guys to find bugs.
Some good news: the URLs have been slightly changed, but a redirection system is in place this time, so all links from the previous image system will work flawlessly (what could go wrong?) in the new system. It still might be the case that there are image links (to albums, or to thumbnail pages) from 2 rewrites ago (from more than a few months ago) that might be broken. If anyone can find such a link please point it out and then I can easily add it to the redirection function. I just honestly can't remember how those URLs were created.
Down the home stretch.
The music system now defaults to sorting by album (then artist, track number, track name.) You can click the column headings to get it to sort by 'track name' or by 'album'.
And the search engine was not constraining it's results properly in some cases, most notably when searching while in a 'by artist' view. Now you should only get results from the restricted collection of music defined by whatever view you are in. (If I am looking at /music/jim/artist/beatles and I do a search, I will only get results back from hits on just the set comprised of my beatles songs.)
Assuming everything is working correctly now, the only thing left is to add the ability to order the tracks inside a user created playlist (this will happen when you click through 'edit this playlist'.)
So my idea is to use the new /music scripts as the basis for all the media management on the site. Right now that means updating /image to the new format, and also creating /video. Basically all the heavy work is done, I just have to tweak the script to look in different tables in the database (say, the image table instead of music) and then change how the output is displayed.
First, does anybody see any big problems I am missing?
And next, what information do people want displayed in /image? Obviously the description of the picture (this will be like trackname is in /music.) Do we want the filename displayed to, or just link the description to the filename like /music does it? Of course the size of the image file. Maybe the upload date? Do we need to see the image owner listed?
I'd like to keep it as simple as possible. Additional information for each picture could be displayed (as it is now) on the image edit screen. But what info can't be left off the main /image lists?