The move is happening right now – the data was moved to our own database server long ago, and the files have now been moved to the new webserver. Once the DNS updates have been sent out, we’ll be officially running entirely on our own servers.
If you can see the image below, you’re running on the new server already…
I’ve just enabled a new and powerful plugin for batch-adding users to a blog. It’s much simpler than the previous one, and only requires the email addresses for people to be added to your site.
On any of your UCalgaryBlogs.ca sites, just go to the Dashboard, and open the Tools section. There, you’ll find an item called “Import Users”. All you need to do is enter the email addresses of the people to be imported, one address per line, and then select the role to be used for the users on that site. Click the “Import Users” button, and the users will be added to the site. If they don’t have accounts at UCalgaryBlogs.ca, one will be created automatically for them. They will receive an email containing their login information, and the address of the site.
Thanks to Boone Gorges for developing the new plugin!
We were finally able to upgrade the software that runs UCalgaryBlogs.ca to the shiny new WordPress 3.0. There are a lot of minor tweaks to the interface that should make the service easier to use.
There are also still some rough spots that need to be worked out after the upgrade. Most of them are performance-related, but some plugins may be acting up. If you notice anything out of the ordinary, please let D’Arcy know ASAP.
Some of the improvements include:
[embed]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NINOxRxze9k[/embed]
and WordPress will magically create the embed code to display the video. like this one:
The fancy new media embed feature works automatically for all media hosted by these services:
We hope you’ll find the upgrade worthwhile. If you have any questions, please let D’Arcy know.
One of the initial goals behind setting up a blogging platform was that it should be possible for anonymous or pseudonymous blogging – the ability for people to create accounts that aren’t tied to their real or public identity. To allow that, it was possible to create an account using any email address, not just from the @ucalgary.ca email domain.
Unfortunately, the world of spammers on the internet saw that as an opportunity. Over the years, they have used this to create thousands of accounts, thousands of websites, and temporarily publish thousands of pages of filthy spam in their efforts to trick Google into increasing the search rankings of the websites they link to.
It’s gotten to the point that most of the time I have available to spend supporting and extending UCalgaryBlogs.ca has been wasted in removing the spam websites and accounts created by these people. As a result, I’ve decided to require valid @ucalgary.ca email addresses for new accounts on UCalgaryBlogs.ca
Anonymous and pseudonymous blogging is still important – you don’t have to use your real name, and your email address won’t be exposed. If you really want privacy and anonymity, there are now a number of excellent third party solutions available off campus, where you can use any email account and ensure that your activities are completely separate from your campus identity.
There have been a bunch of changes, hopefully improvements, over the last few days.
I’ve got a bunch of other things I’m (slowly) working on, and will try to roll out some more improvements over the holiday break.
If you have any questions, please contact me.
The planned database code migration took a LOT longer than planned, and didn’t work out in the end. I wound up having to back out the planned code changes, so we’re back where we started. In addition, the campus database server became unhappy as part of the process, and blocked connection attempts from the server that runs UCalgaryBlogs (and a bunch of other stuff) – so I had to migrate all data to a Teaching & Learning Centre database server so we could use UCalgaryBlogs again.
I’d done testing of the new database code, and it worked fine prior to attempting to roll it out on the production server. I’ll do some more testing (and am talking to the developer of the new database code to help debug the situation). I won’t try to do any further rollouts of the code without some extensive testing – and all data will be safe, regardless.
I need to convert some of the database configuration for UCalgaryBlogs to new library that will offer us higher performance and more scalable database connections.
I’ve tested the new configuration, and it should work just fine. If there are no snags, there should be no more than a few seconds of downtime. If the gremlins decide to come out and play, that may be extended to a few minutes as I revert to the previous configuration.
I’m planning to do the configuration change at 10am on Wednesday, November 11. Hopefully, it being a holiday, and the beginning of reading week, there should be little activity on the site (you DO have other things to do, right?). It should only take a few seconds, but in the worst case scenario, the service will be back up and running normally no later than 11am that day.
If you have any concerns, please let me know. I’ll post an update after the database configuration has been changed.
I think I’ve tracked down the cause of the problem that was preventing access to the Dashboard on all sites. If you’re still having trouble accessing your Dashboard, or with publishing new blog posts, please let me know ASAP.
I apologize for the inconvenience this problem caused. I know it’s difficult when the software doesn’t work when expected – especially under the pressure of writing as part of a course. Thanks to everyone who reported the problem – that really helped me track down the cause and (hopefully) fix it as quickly as possible.
There is currently an issue preventing users from accessing their Dashboards for their sites – meaning you can’t write new blog posts, or edit existing posts (among other things).
I’m working on tracking down the cause of this right now. Hopefully it won’t take long to debug this.
I apologize for the inconvenience. Thanks for bearing with the difficulties here on UCalgaryBlogs.ca!
I just rolled out a mobile interface for UCalgaryBlogs.ca – if you’re accessing the site from a mobile device such as iPhone, iPod Touch, Blackberry, or Android, you should now see a sleeker, optimized interface. It’s not perfect, but it’ll load a LOT faster, and should display a LOT better on the small screen, as opposed to the scaled version of the “normal” interface. Here’s a screenshot of the front page of ucalgaryblogs.ca under the new mobile interface:
There are a few options to tweak, if you really want to, to customize how the mobile version of your site works – check out your Dashboard, in the Settings section, for an item called “WPTouch” and click the shiny checkboxes to your heart’s content.
Bad Behavior has blocked 999 access attempts in the last 7 days.
