As many of you have probably already noticed, things are a little rough around the edges here at Blogcritics.org right now. We were forced by our former host, Bloghosts, to move under ridiculous circumstances, with the owner of that operation going out of his way to burn up any goodwill he might have accumulated over the last eight months. Jace Herring's silliness and refusal to communicate has made things a bit more difficult than they otherwise might have been.
Anyway, we're on a new server, and it's a dedicated server, so we don't have to share with anybody else. That's nice. But it's also a slightly slower server than the one we've been sharing, which has highlighted some problems in Movable Type about which we've long been concerned. Basically, MT is a real pig when it comes to large sites, and with more than 15000 entries and 64000 comments, we're a large site. Too large for MT, really. We've been able to cover things up a bit by throwing a very fast computer at it, but it still hasn't been great.
Things are looking up, though! TDavid and I have been trying to figure out what to do, and he talked me into embarking on a radical evisceration of MovableType. If all goes well, things will settle down and the only change you'll notice is that everything will be much faster. While we're hacking away, things are still a little broken in certain areas, but that will pass.
Comments are already at lightning-speed. Go ahead, post a comment here. You'll be delighted, I assure you. Once I get the most recent comments to show up on the sidebar again, you'll be even more delighted. Emailing the comments to post authors is coming back soon, too.
Posting entries is still slow. Entries are considerably more complex than comments. But that will improve as well, so please be patient. And revere TDavid as a minor deity, or at least an esteemed minion of a deity.
I'll try to update this post with progress, either here or in the comments. Probably the comments, because that's faster. :-)
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Phillip Winn
Wow, it took 64 seconds to post this. Very sad. I *really* don't want to write my own template tag parser from scratch, but I just might have to.
2 - Phillip Winn
The good news is that the comment posted so quickly I didn't have time to check the stopwatch. Less than a second!
3 - Ms. Tek
Boogars! Snot! George Bush! John Kerry! Boobs! Tits! White People! Black People! Everthing costs $10 and everyone has $10!
4 - Ms. Tek
Wow.. that was fast!
5 - Eric Olsen
the comments just disappeared on this post
6 - Eric Olsen
now they reappeared
7 - Phillip Winn
THere does seem to be an issue with the most recent post's comments disappearing temporarily when a new post is created. I know what's causing that, and suspected it would happen, but I'm not sure how to fix it yet. :-)
8 - Phillip Winn
Okay, that shouldn't happen anymore, but brand new posts will have an error until a comment is posted -- at least until I fix that.
9 - Ms. Tek
=(
10 - TDavid
hehe :)
11 - Phillip Winn
Okay, the comment sidebar is back. Woohoo!
12 - TDavid
Good job manno :) Saw that you called earlier. I'm in the office now.
13 - Natalie Davis
I just moved my site to bloghosts. What the heck happened with them? Should I consider -- sob -- another move?
14 - Phillip Winn
Natalie, as much as I would like to say that everybody should run as far away from Bloghosts and Jaca Herring as possible, you're probably pretty safe.
What happened from my perspective is this: (I'm sure others involved would disagree, so take this as my opinion only)
Eight months ago Eric was approached by Jace Herring who was working on getting Bloghosts off the ground. He proposed a deal whereby we would get a reduced rate on hosting in exchange for prime advertising space. Good deal for us, good deal for Jace, since Blogcritics is a very prominent blogging site, one of the bigger blog sites around. In fact, I think that the advertising rates here increased quite a bit during the last eight months, so the deal was better at the end than the beginning, because the value we were providing was greater.
Anyway, Blogcritics is a pretty intensive site, so he ended up having to put us on a very fast box -- as I mentioned above -- but he happily did all this months and months ago. Since then there have been one or two major outages (Eric would remember better than I do), but they've been resolved reasonably.
THen, a few weeks ago, Jace sent an extremely terse email to Eric telling him to go somewhere else or start ponying up a *lot* more money. Too much, by far. Of course, this came in right before Eric's vacation, and mine, and our deadline was the day after Memorial Day. Silly us, we didn't move aggresively enough, preferring to figure out why the relationship had suddenly gone so sour.
We got no response from Jace for a long time, or rude responses, or whatever. We made incredibly hasty hosting arrangements on Tuesday, with the help of TDavid, and managed to get everything moved over, but Jace refused to give us so much as one day in order for DNS changes to propogate. Nothing, just name-calling and rudeness.
I have no idea what caused Jace to become so unhinged, and for all I know Eric just stepped on his toes. Eric can get anxious, but I'm a low-key guy and I don't let it get to me. Perhaps the bizarre expectation that our site would actually not go down for hours at a time was too much for him? Beats me.
Anyway, the bottom line is, he screwed us. But I've got another site on bloghosts, and it's fine. I don't anticipate any problems there unless Jace takes offense at this comment and retaliates. I would hope not, since that one is similiarly a group site and my only involvement with the hosting was to suggest that Jace was a swell guy.
So here we are, and there you are, and things are probably cool. It looks like we're both fine. And it also looks like Eric took off the modified adstrip I put up for bloghosts. Too bad, I thought it was funny!
15 - jadester
aha, that explains it...
btw, eric or phillip or any other BC admins, how much of the "behind the scenes" workings info of BC do you have? e.g. what language is used to parse the tags?
I have some knowledge of XMLXSLTHTML and have been using Java for three years at uni. Whilst i'm trying to get a job, i'm looknig for stuff to do that would sound good on my CV. A whole system for parsing BC posts would sound pretty good i reckon (no charge, natch, you guys give us this site for free)
16 - Phillip Winn
Aight, the comments should not be erased any more, and new posts won't have errors, and the comment sidebar is back (though I need to edit it just slightly).
Thanks for talking me into this, TDavid! And thanks again for the hours of hard-core coding you put in late last night.
Oh yeah, the sections on the front page are updating properly again, though of course that is one reason why posting entries is so darned slow.
What am I missing? Leaderboard errors are resolved.
17 - Phillip Winn
jadester, how much of the "behind the scenes" workings info of BC do you have?
The stories I could tell you! MT itself is written in Perl, and BC makes heavy use of PHP to handle things best done outside of MT. Which is a lot of things, including comments now.
ANyway, all of the tag parsing is done by the Perl code. I think I can strip a bunch of stuff out and speed MT up to a reasonable speed without having to rewrite a parser, but if that breaks down, I'll email you and see how quickly you want to learn PHP. ;-)
18 - Phillip Winn
I think TDavid took away the ability to includes images. COuld we do that before?
img src="/images/zevon.jpg">
Can we now?
19 - Phillip Winn
COmments may not include images. I think that there are good reasons for this, and we've been lucky to avoid serious problems so far, but I'm sure some people will be unhappy. Sorry.
20 - Phillip Winn
I think comments are working perfectly now, though I will someday soon make time to be more careful about which tags are allowed or disallowed.
That leaves the speed of posting as the only active problem, no?
21 - Craig Lyndall
So, we can't include images in main posts anymore?
22 - Phillip Winn
THey can be in posts, no problem. Just not in comments, for now.
23 - Phillip Winn
That's weird. I tested the slash-removal earlier, but the slashes are back. Wha...?
24 - Mac Diva
Good question.
Something I'm encountering is being told an entry or comment did not post only to have it turn up later. For example, according to MT, the entry about Cosby I began trying to post during meltdown never went through. But, it did.
25 - Phillip Winn
So, we can't predict when the slashes will reappear in the sidebar?
This should be it, I'm stripping those darn things at every possible step!