Site Maintenance

Visitors to Phatic Communion and D5GW should be aware that the two sites will be undergoing some site maintenance, which will likely mean that commenting and trackbacks will not be working as normal.

Earlier today, the sites were suspended by my host LivingDot due to server load.  Anyone visiting during that time would have received a 403 Access Denied message.  Although I am still not certain what caused the excessive server load, the excellent folks at LivingDot, as usual, have responded quickly to my inquiries and have moved to install “FastCGI” which will allow Movable Type to operate 14-times faster than it had.

I would like to note, that in 2 years of service, I have never once had a problem with my host LivingDot.  In fact, every time an issue or problem of some sort has arisen, I have been quite surprised at the level and quickness of service provided by LivingDot.  Pavel Ushakov, the Managing Director of LivingDot Inc., often replies to service tickets himself, even when others working at LivingDot are already working on the problem.  Service inquiries are usually answered within minutes; and follow-up emails are also prompt, as are any host-side changes or server improvements!

Along with the installation of FastCGI, my Movable Type installation has been upgraded from v. 3.2 to v. 3.34.  The last upgrade of MT required a revision of various MT plugin versions as well.  Both changes will certainly require back-end tweaks to the site.  The MT upgrade will require a change in templates, since some plugins include specific code within the templates.  At the moment, the only plugin I know for certain must be upgraded is a plugin for reducing trackback and comment spam to the site; until I have upgraded it and rebuilt individual post pages, comments and trackbacks will likely not work (or cause some odd errors.)  The next day or two should reveal other things needing tweaking.  Until the necessary requirements are revealed, and changes made, the blogs may not operate as before.

LivingDot has also suggested that I require TypeKey logins for commenting to reduce comment spam.  Eliminating comment spam can take up a lot of server time, depending on the routines/plugins used for reducing it.  Generally, I like allowing quick commenting, or not putting roadblocks and detours for commenting, because I like feedback and do not want to inconvenience visitors.  However, TypeKey logins do not take a lot of time, and others in our Blogospheric neighborhood may be moving to such a requirement as well.  Why not promote that standard? (Especially given the fact that Google’s Blogger blogs also require visitors to jump through some hoops when commenting…)

I’ll keep everyone posted with updates to this entry.  Let’s hope that all goes well.


Update:  As expect, the upgrades have led to some problems which will need to be sorted before everything works properly.  Unexpectedly, however, some issues are going to be bigger than previously thought.  Given my schedule over the next few days, I may not have everything sorted for a few days.  At the least:  Comments and trackbacks will not work properly for posts after this post, until I have rebuilt all the individual archive pages — which I don’t plan to do until after the rest of the mess is fixed.  I’ll keep posting updates as I can.

Update#2: Still working on some problems.  Primarily now, I’m working on the page in the MT interface which should allow creation and posting of entries — but doesn’t.  I’m having to use the Performancing plugin for Firefox just to update this entry, and would need to use it for posting new entries.  Plus, although I’ve updated the plugin that allows posting information to new fields for each post (e.g., whether it is updated or cross-posted) it is not working properly on the back-end; the fields don’t show up for editing.

Update#3: A lot of changes to the Movable Type plugins for this installation: deletions, as well as updates to versions compatible with Movable Type 3.34. Unfortunately, FastCGI for some reason causes the MT plugin interface to not work properly: changes to status (enabled/disabled), deletions of plugins from the system/server, installations of new plugins, and updates to existing plugins do not appear for a very long time — hours, even. So until everything is able to update to reflect the changes I have made, I will not be able to proceed to the next step of checking templates to remove or update various plugin template tags. This means I’m not going to rebuild the individual archives and monthly archives, etc., until the aforementioned changes have be detected by Movable Type. (The process can eat up server time as well as my own, waiting for it to be complete; so, no rebuilding of archives until I’m certain everything else is in order.) This also means that commenting and trackbacks for earlier entries still will not work. Comments should still work on this entry, however, and on any entries that may be posted after this entry.

Thursday evening sometime, everything will be resolved. I hope.

Update#4: Working on it…working on it. The blogroll links may not be correct! Last rebuild of the main page actually got the blogroll to display properly…but all the links were to the main page of D5GW instead of the linked sites! Now I’m going to retry posting this update from the entry creation page….