Posted by proteus on September 12th,2009
Ladies and Gentlemen, your humble site administrator interrupts this weblog to notify you all of a few changes around these parts that should help with bandwidth and performance.
First, I have just completed applying security patches to all the plugins we use.
Second, we’ve migrated our RSS feed to use FeedBurner – the old feed will still work, but if you’d be so kind as to use the new feed, I’d be grateful. Find the new feed URL using your browser’s auto-discovery system or by using the Entries RSS link you find at the bottom of every page.
Finally, we’ve migrated the comments system to DISQUS. This should reduce spam, and also make it easier for people to comment, while saving us oodles of bandwidth and making moderation and tracking tremendously easier. It may be a little while before old comments appear – there are a lot of them to convert – so don’t fret.
Hopefully, these changes will be for the better, but they can be backed out if they’re really problematic.
Cheers! We now return you to your irregularly-unscheduled weblog updates.
Posted by proteus on June 18th,2009
This post briefly covers two topics – the June 16/17 unplanned downtime, and upcoming planned downtime.
Posted by proteus on April 30th,2009
Your friendly site admin here, with an advisory note.
There are several security and performance-related patches that have been tested against the various bits under the bonnet of the BrassGoggles blog and forum, and we’ll be installing these starting tonight, and extending through the weekend.
We’re also taking this opportunity to perform a little maintenance and retooling so that things continue to run efficiently.
At various times over the next several days, you may notice some intermittent down time as various components are taken down for maintenance. We don’t anticipate any particular instance of downtime to be more than about 15 minutes.
I have set up a status page on a separate server; check there for updates if you’re curious. If you have questions about this project, ask them in the comments here: I will do my best to answer them as I have time.
Update 2009-05-07 09:52:06 CT: Intermittent issues with database corruption have prompted a rebuild of the database. A few recent comments on the blog and forum may have been lost, but this damage should be minimal. Database config changes have been made in an attempt to correct this issue; unfortunately, all we can do at this point is watch and hope.
Posted by proteus on November 25th,2008
UPDATE: If you’re seeing this, you’re at our new home! You may notice that your address bar contains ‘74.126.25.104’ instead of ‘brassgoggles.co.uk'; fret not, that should be fixed in a few days (it’s a side effect of moving to the new host).
My apologies for the short notice: we’d intended to manage this a little more slowly, but were caught off guard by a particular requirement of our upgrade process that I hadn’t planned for.
At this time, the comments to the blog are disabled, and the forum has been taken off-line. This is to prevent data loss as we make the move. This is no longer true. Comment and forum-ify away!
This move should go much more smoothly than the last round, since we’re staying with the same hosting company, and just moving to a bigger server. Thanks to everyone who has donated so far, you’ve made this move possible for at least the next few months. Please continue to support our plan to be funded for 5 years by following the Amazon badge found in the Donate area of the right column (waaaay at the bottom).
Soon, soon, Now, we will no longer have our 503 errors that have plauged the forum of late! (fingers firmly crossed).
Posted by OutaSpaceman on October 29th,2008
The forum is back…
The Steampunk Forum…
I wish to extend my heart felt thanks to Mr. D. Meyer for his heroic efforts in this respect…
O.S.M.
Posted by proteus on October 29th,2008
Your friendly (and rather welted) techie, here! If you’re seeing this post, you’ve arrived at the new home of BrassGoggles. You may notice that “steam.punqs.org” is in your address bar — don’t panic, this is only a temporary change so that people who have Internet Providers that are less savvy than yours have a chance to catch up. In about a week, the domain name in your address bar will change, and links to either brassgoggles.co.uk or steam.punqs.org will work.
We can’t guarantee that the steam.punqs.org name will be around forever, so please continue to use brassgoggles.co.uk in your links whenever you can. Thanks for your patience and understanding.
Comments are back on and, oh yes… and the Forum is back!
Maybe now OSM will put his lash away.
