The Upgrade and the Damage Done
For better or worse, the damage is done now: the Peninsular is upgraded to the very latest Drupal 4.7 and you have probably already noticed how so very little the site has changed considering I laboured a nearly solid 12-hour day to get it just this far :)
But it has changed. Honest it has.
Whether those changes help you publish your journals or jump the shark and make this thing impossible to use remains to be seen, but already you'll find some nice changes such as getting all that editorial options form junk out of the way when you post your stories. It's still there, folded into the bottom of the story editor (and that may cause some older browsers to complain) but when nearly nobody but me ever fiddles with any of that stuff, it just doesn't make sense to make everyone wade through it for every little post.
Other changes are probably just as subtle, but one thing that has not changed is the content -- the upgrade preserved every story, every post and every comment, and that's the part that had me most worried -- teledyn.com has been on the wire here for 10 years now, and the peninsular has been running solid for nearly half that time; it would be a shame to lose that record from a technical glitch.
I do expect there will be problems, some of them big problems, and some may be easy to fix, others may require a complete rethinking of the way things were done around here. That's all inevitable in this business. If you notice something not quite right, don't hesitate to send me a privmsg to let me know -- I can't guarantee I'll fix it right away or even that I can fix it at all, but I still want to know. Just in case.
Why oh why oh why?
So, why did I bother? Well, it's like this: In the computing world there is no provision for staying put -- if you get into the game, you either upgrade or die, a phenomenon I call Rip Van Winkle Syndrome grips this industry and while you can hold out for a while, for all sorts of reasons (see my main blog for the full gory detail) you cannot hold out for any more than a few years, and the longer you hold out, the more expensive and dangerous the leap to get with the flow again. The Peninsular had hit a major chasm between the state of the code it ran and the distance to catch up with code that was still being fixed by its authors.
As a side note, should anyone care about such things, this current update had to be done now because the Drupal software has taken a step beyond the point of no return with regards to the database that holds your stories and profiles -- we could just slip in under the wire on this release, but only because you have someone like me to slap solder on the bursting pipes; I was worried that the next Drupal release would be incompatible with this old server, as is most other software I have tried to install in the past year. I do have a plan to make that leap out of my RVW slumber, but having now squandered one weekend on just the portal-kit upgrade, I think I'll rest a bit before I attempt the next high-wire act :)
Now we can go forward
There was another impetus to this upgrade: in the years since, the Drupal community has blossomed and with all those many developers all working in different directions from the same generic code-base, there are now a staggering number of add-ons and feature enhancements available for the portal software. While many are probably hyped beyond their abilities (as happens with all software, not just commercial software) some of them are probably also very good and could be extremely useful on a community journal website like the peninsula. Now that we are upgraded, we can find out :)
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| this is our story the sbp community portal is a not-for-profit volunteer community communications project giving a free internet voice to residents of the town of south bruce peninsula through an easy and open public forum. the framework for the sbp is ©2007 Gary Lawrence Murphy Sauble Beach, Ontario sbp @ teledyn.com |
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Long Day's Journey into Night
It is getting better, it really is: please bear with us, folks, but boiler pipes are hissing at me in all directions and I'm bailing water as fast as I possibly can. There have been database problems, format problems, stylesheet problems -- I spent 4 hours this evening just finding out that what had worked fine to float my subtitle below the banner on my personal blog would now cause the sidebar to run straight down the middle of the text on every page but the home page!
sigh ... this is why I hate to touch any software that even kind-of sort-of works.
Anyway, as normally happens with anything to do with computers, it is taking far longer than I'd hoped and still many puzzles left to solve and probably many more that I just haven't noticed yet. If you find a problem, please try to let me know by SBP private message or send me an email to sbp at teledyn.com -- I can't make any promises as to when, but I really do plan to get it all patched up and working again.
Why not leave well enough alone?
Aye now there's the $52 question. I mentioned some bit back there above here how RvW had forced my hand, and yesterday when I posted that welcome back message I really was full of the enthusiasm of standing at the break of a new dawn ... until I got an email from Bub that pointed out how every anonymous visitor to the site was seemingly being offered the power to ban any other member! Yikes!! ... they couldn't, fortunately, it would actually bar anyone without authority from doing such a drastic act, but nonetheless the option was there to be clicked and it shouldn't have been. So I removed the ability completely (even for myself, but that's ok, I have other ways to block evil) and it was then I noticed the menu link just above that was even worse: It allowed for any spammer to post any and as many spam links as they wished, freely and unchallenged!!!
I hit the ceiling. I posted a very strongly worded Bug Report to Drupal.org and I clammoured around for hours ensuring that this link was eradicated from all 5 of the Drupal sites hosted on teledyn.com -- given this severe security hole and given a report just released this morning on another, I felt I should take no chances; one of the by-products of letting kids write our software is that as soon as one version is out the door, they never think of it again, they move one to the next kewl thing, so it was really quite likely that the newer release might be better. Besides, knowing how little time I have for fighting upgrades, I didn't want to be faced with ol' RvW again for as long as possible ... so I pulled the trigger and updated to the next release.
It seemed to go really well, but now I hear from Dodge that his logins stop loading half way. I myself tried to login and was told my login was invalid ... double YIKES!!!
The short story is, please hold in there, keep trying, let me know where it gets really rough. If something doesn't work the way you thought it would please report to me
It is very important that you give me as much descriptive information as you can so I can try and get the same result myself. I'm suspecting some of these problems may be database performance issues which will be very hard to track down and sort out, but there's always the chance that it will turn out to be something very simple and easy to correct.
This sounds like Star Trek
Somehow garym I'm picturing you as Scottie calling out that the deterium crystals can't hold up much longer. Keep up the good work, my systems running great. I had the login problems that you decribed for Dodge BEFORE you upgraded the software.
Warp speed ahead.
Dan O.
Rerouting Auxilliary Power from the Main Warp Engines ...
And I think she'll just about make it ...
I'm into re-enabling the features, and adding a few more NEW features that you may enjoy, among them ...
Who the Heck is This? - When you visit a blog entry or forum topic, you will see the author's bio posted in the sidebar. Many members have really skeletal bios filled out in their Account Page and I say shame on them for that because we're supposed to be right neighbourly in these parts and that should include at least telling your neighbours just who it is who's speakin' at 'em. That's my opinion, and since it's my site, I'm throwing the bios in the sidebars to embarrass the heck out of the folks who hide behind a semi-anonymous handle :)
Mind you, there's nobody sayin' you can't, well, stretch the truth a little, post an old photo, like, or make up some impressive degrees ...
Maybe worth a note here to say that while members can see this impressive bio of yours, the anonymous public (and the websearch robots) cannot; I can't vouch for what other members might do with what they read, but I can say that you are just a handle to the casual visitor.
HEY YOU! - Yes, you may have already seen the Announce Box that's front and centre at the top of the page when you have waiting messages, when people want to get you into the chat, or when you've entered in some bit of data that the site robots didn't like.
Comment Tracking
with RSS- Say wha?Well, if you are using Firefox (and you should) you no longer have to keep popping back to see if someone asnwers that bit you posted about the Checkboard ... just grab the Syndicate link and you will have a nearly instantant (ok, 'timely') notification of all updates via the magic of Really Simple Syndication (RSS).I spoke too soon there -- you really can do the RSS thing, but there is no automatic way to subscribe to the post, you have to take the URL and hand-edit it to add crss/ at the front and add that to your RSS tracking gear. That's ok for the hard-core, but for the regular folks I found a much simpler widget called Subscriptions that simply adds two links to the bottom of the lead story, one to let you track everything this author writes about (that's for the fans) and a second link to keep tabs on this particular conversation. In both cases, you get an email telling you what's up.
Recipes are back! - Bub will be so happy. The form to fill out is indeed a little jet-cockpit-like, but on the plus side you can print out recipies in handy HTML for printing with your browser, or you can download them in handly RecipeML, the standard data exchange format for better recipe software everywhere.
Shareable Events - speaking of downloading ... there are no events in our calendar just now, but notice that little icon in the lower right of the sidebar box? That's an iCAL export button, and what that means is you can download events into your own calendar software, of which the very best calendar software is the Google Calendar that comes free if you ask me for your very own TELEDYN.COM email account. I did tell you about your free 2GB gmail-like Teledyn/SBP email/chat/calendar account didn't I? If you want one, just ask.
Google Search - And speaking of Google things, you'll find a second search-box in the left sidebar, this one taking you to google but restricting the scan to just this website. If you'd been as frustated as me with the simplistic search thing built into this site, you'll be a real happy puppy now.
Comment Relocation - This one is for me although walteib's going to love this too: next time someone posts a forum topic that should be a blog or comment that should be a topic or an event that should maybe be an event but differently I can snip it out and paste it where it is supposed to go! Pure magic. Been waitin' hundreds of years for this one.
And much much more! - Yeah, I'm still working my way down the list of potential services. I don't want to add them all at once just in case it cracks the dilithium crystals and that could put the warp drive offline for weeks.
Looking good in IE, opera,
Looking good in IE, opera, safari and firefox(mozilla too) except for a few funky parallel dashes 1/8 inch from the right sidebar lines(in IE only..but what would you expect from IE)..very nice..don't forget to put Teledyn's fav.ico instead of drupals smiling blue head:)
looks good Gary, guess this calls for a double jug:)
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"Did A.J.Krapper organize a mass walk-out of latrines?"
-zenGary
communications
I'm not sure if everyone got a small part of what Gary posted awhile back, but one part of it is he has set up gmail communications, your very own @sbp.teledyn email via gmail.I have been trying it out, it works good, and the chat windows that you can chat with other members work very nice.Just email gary, and he'll set you up and voila..its free remember :)
I usually keep the chat open all the time :)
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"How does one "Seem to think". Either you did or you didn't. "
-ZenGary
Did ya miss me?
No, we hadn't succumbed to a council gag order, but we were missing in action for a few days while I sorted out the fall-out from hauling the teledyn.com machines into the more Modern Times of RedHat FC5. The good news is this post proves we're at least hobblin' along again.
For the curious, here's what went wrong: With the upgrade to Linux FC5 we gained a much needed upgrade in the database that holds all your accounts and posts, but also gained an update to the Apache.org webserver and an upgrade to the PHP-5, and therein the cause of the mysterious troubles because my personal blog was still going fine, as was KeeMay's and the other satallite sites, but SBP was just a blank page, the usual tantrum response of PHP to anything it doesn't like. Its beef was completely unexpected: The newer and improveder PHP code, it seems, is more wasteful of memory than ever, and while SBP worked fine in PHP4, under PHP5 it just blew the Eight Megabyte gasket container by all of 64 bytes.
So I upped it to 10 et voilà!
To all those who wrote in to express their condolences for my sleepless night and giving morale support by offering to help in anyway, which was approximately nobody, my sincere thanks ;) I'm deeply touched.
It would be improper
Gary; all most of us could do was let you know that something was going on. How do you advise the master of the system on what is wrong. It would be even worse if we fixed it :)
Dan O.