Manila

Naptime for Buzzword.Com

I'm planning to take Buzzword.Com down for maintenance on Sunday morning. The Manila databases have to be compacted, a process that cleans out deleted data and improves performance, and I'm also working on the Manila customer support board to fix some problems plaguing a few users. ... (read more)

2004/12/04

Closing Movable Type Comments

I'm winning the war on comment spam on Wordzilla, my homebrew weblog software, thanks to PHP code that rejects link-heavy comments and submissions from banned IP addresses. I'm losing on Movable Type and Manila. Both programs are being flooded with spam that has to be hand-deleted, a chore that's miserably time consuming in each. Six Apart enhanced Movable Type's comment-management features in version 3.1, but it can take up to five minutes to delete a group of spam comments on the Drudge ... (read more)

2004/11/30

Tracking Weblog Updates in Manila

Since adopting 3,000 webloggers from Weblogs.Com last June, I've had a huge amount of trouble tracking site activity on the new Manila server I set up to house these sites. An elusive bug prevented the recent updates page from working correctly. During the Weblogs.Com server outage, the media went nuts over the 3,000-weblog figure, making the story front page news. As I have since discovered, that number was inflated by a bunch of dead sites on the server. I deleted more than 1,200 weblogs this ... (read more)

2004/11/19

Handling 18.5 Janets of Web Traffic

The Drudge Retort was hammered yesterday, serving 10 gigabytes of traffic as thousands of people looked for exit polls and early election returns. The unit of measurement for traffic here is Janet Jackson's right breast, the exposure of which maxed out the shared SDSL connection on my old server. For seventeen straight hours, it served 144 kilobytes per second of traffic (1 Janet) to people on a fruitless search for celebrity mammary. Since that time, I have moved to dedicated server hosting ... (read more)

2004/11/03

The Incredible Shrinking Server

I spent some time this afternoon compacting the seven Frontier databases that hold the weblogs on Buzzword.Com. Weblog publishers should see improved performance on page loads and other requests. Also, I have added two links to the sidebar that help promote weblogs on the server: top 100 rankings and a list of recently updated weblogs. I suspect that the latter needs some more debugging. Weblogs should appear on the list within minutes of being updated. Buzzword users: If you'd like to help ... (read more)

2004/10/28

UserLand Buzzing with Improvements

In the past six weeks, UserLand Software has released more than 14 updates to Manila, the server software running all of the weblogs on Buzzword.Com. I added these updates today and they appear -- tempting fate here -- to be running properly. UserLand Product News describes these changes, which improve the performance of the software, swat bugs, and add a few new features. Here are the upgrades most noticeable to weblog publishers: On a discussion board, message subject length has been ... (read more)

2004/10/20

Buzzword.Com: Down But Not Out

Buzzword.Com has been experiencing server outages this week, but should be back online and fully operational. I'm still learning about the care and feeding of a Manila server. For the most part, it looks after itself, even to the point of rebooting automatically after a crash. If you can't bring up a site on the server, check back in 10-15 minutes and it should be back online. This wasn't the case earlier this week: A conflict between Microsoft Internet Information Server and Manila caused all ... (read more)

2004/09/17

Editing Blogroll Links in Manila

A joke from 2cents, a long dormant site hosted on Buzzword.Com: An old fellow was snoozing away contentedly when he was startled awake by the doorbell. He staggered off the couch to make his way to the door. There stood a gorgeous young woman. "Oh my goodness," the pretty young thing exclaimed, "I'm at the wrong house." "Sweetheart, you're at the right house," the old guy assured her. "But you're forty years too late." As this is being written, a UserTalk script is plodding slowly through the ... (read more)

2004/08/30

Weblog Hosting Priced to Move

Sept. 18 marks the day that free hosting is scheduled to end on Buzzword.Com, the server that houses 3,000 weblogs formerly published at Weblogs.Com. After learning about the costs required to host the sites and the amount of activity on the server, I have changed those plans: All existing weblogs will be hosted for free, as long as they've been updated at least once in 2004. Defunct sites also can stay at the request of their publishers, and I'll be allowing new sites to join the server soon. ... (read more)

2004/08/27

Sending E-mail from Manila Weblogs

With the help of the Electric Dirt Farmer, I found and resolved an issue that prevented a few webloggers on Buzzword.Com from requesting their account passwords. Manila users can receive a forgotten password in e-mail by filling out the weblog's login page with an e-mail address and no password. If there's an account at that address, the password will be e-mailed. Manila sends password reminders and other e-mail from the weblog's E-mail Confirmation Sender setting. To see this sender address, ... (read more)

2004/07/05

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