Hello everyone, it’s your friendly Ozblogistan Tyrant here.
I plan to migrate our servers to a different data centre tonight. There will be some disruption during the move, and it may take time for your DNS records to be updated.
We’re moving from the Fremont data centre, which has turned out to be about as reliable as a Ford Pinto, to the Dallas data centre (I look forward to your big-hats-and-oil jokes).
As some of you know, we’ve had a hit-and-miss experience with comment subscription plugins. The plugin we were previously using broke when we upgraded to 3.2.1 and made it impossible to unsubscribe.
We’ve switched to another plugin which requires “double opt-in”. I’d be interested in any feedback Troppodillians might have on their experience so far.
Hello all, your friendly Ozblogistan tyrant here.
To perform some important maintenance on the site, it will be necessary to deactivate all Ozblogistan blogs temporarily on Sunday afternoon. I am expecting to take the site down around 2pm, central standard time, for up to two hours.
For some time now I, your friendly Ozblogistan Tyrant, have been considering expanding the Ozblogistan family. For my thesis research I require a larger pool of blogs under management.
To that end, I have opened up a second server for Ozblogistan. Shortly, one server will handle the database while the original server handles the web side of things.
This will (theoretically) speed up performance and make it easier for me to grow Ozblogistan.
This decision is unrelated to the recent stoushing (though the stoushing may lead to other changes in future).
What this means:
To keep discussion of this matter centralised, I have disabled comments everywhere except on the main Ozblogistan entry.
Thank you for your attention.
Updates
Taking the plunge:
Hello all, your friendly Ozblogistan tyrant here.
LP’s domain name has expired. Consequently it is no longer possible to navigate directly to larvatusprodeo.net.
I have reactivated larvatusprodeo.ozblogistan.com.au in the meantime while the domain issues are sorted out.
Update: normal service has been resumed.
I’d like to introduce Julia Thornton to Troppodillians. IJulia is involved in the Accountability Roundtable has been dropping in to Troppo for a while now and judging by threads like these is formidably well read in a range of areas. Now speaking as one of the chief bloviators here at Pontification Central I’d just like to say that we don’t normally like people to know too much about what we’re talking about here. It just puts unnecessary pressure on us in this relentless chase for eyeballs. But despite my better judgement I shot Julia an email and suggested that if she were ever cogitating, she would be welcome to pontificate here shortly afterward.
I’ve previously hoisted a guest post of hers on LobbyLens up on Troppo. Julia is a Research Associate at RMIT University, has qualifications in Program Evaluation and a Masters in Social Science and is currently taking time off from work to complete a PhD on Sensemaking with the technology of online learning in Academic teaching: a study of the interaction between academic teaching staff and the RMIT Learning Management System –“Blackboard”. She’s also trained and worked in Early Childhood Education,
Anyway, there you have it. I don’t know if Julia will be a prolific or very occasional poster, but she has the keys to the platform, so I hope we see her next post soon.
Hello all, your friendly Ozblogistan Overlord here.
Last week I wrote briefly about slowness being caused by attempts to debug a comments plugin used by several Ozblogistan blogs — Brian’s Latest Comments — in the context of Larvatus Prodeo. It transpires that LP’s database of comments was too large to process without causing errors and slowdowns. During the week I worked on various modifications; these ‘work’ in that they have the correct behaviour and don’t crash, but in actual use they have proved to be unacceptably slow.
Consequently I have asked our blogs to deactivate the offending plugin for a few weeks. Our busiest, Catallaxy Files and Larvatus Prodeo, have done so, which should for now improve performance for everyone.
Why have I asked them to deactivate it for a few weeks? Because yours truly is moving to Darwin to take up a new job. I won’t have my usual computer for 3 weeks, according to the removalists. Once I am settled in I have another plan of attack to try, but until then I will not be in a position to easily fix things. Until then, enjoy the blogging.
You’ve probably noticed some slowness in the past 2 hours. That’s me, your loving Ozblogistan admin / tyrant, trying to debug a plugin. Apparently asking for debugging information is too much for PHP and MySQL to bear, so they threw an unedifying tantrum which choked the site.
Yesterday’s hail storm here in Perth caused quite a few surprises about the place. I quite enjoyed the wind, thunder and rain bit, it made me feel nostalgic. Wading through suspicious brown soup which came halfway up my thighs to get out of my train stop was the less pleasant part.
It so happens that the hail smashed the windows in the club room of our former hosts, the UCC. Were it not for the otherwise traumatic move to the new server, troppo would have been down and out for at least a few days.
The Great Troppo Migration of 2010 continues to be approximately 10,000 times more stressful than planned.
The latest episode of madness was an attempt to more fully bring across user details from the previous database.
(Continued)
All posts
Comments
Missing Link
Love Gods
Economics
Law 
