I caught her on a park bench, making out with a *chaos* demon! Have you ever seen a chaos demon? They're all slime and antlers.

Spike ,'Sleeper'


Buffistas Building a Better Board ++

Do you have problems, concerns, or recommendations about the technical side of the Phoenix? Air them here. Compliments also welcome.


Kevin - Mar 03, 2007 1:56:37 pm PST #1127 of 4673
Never fall in love with somebody you actually love.

Oh, there's a LOT of bad web hosts, the secret is finding a decent one. A bad one will trash a site sooner than I can cough. And I cough a lot. (A lovely vision).

Dedicated servers suffer from the obvious management issues of upgrades and such, is all, whereas if you have shared hosting that's managed for you (you just have to trust a company to do it).

I google around HostRocket and laugh, also. Seems some people don't like 'em...


NoiseDesign - Mar 03, 2007 2:13:37 pm PST #1128 of 4673
Our wings are not tired

I don't want to go back to the shared server situation. That was a bloody nightmare. How much money are we looking at needing to do this? I'm guessing we are probably looking at around $400 to be on the safe side.


§ ita § - Mar 03, 2007 2:18:49 pm PST #1129 of 4673
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

It was determined that there was a bug in the MySQL code that meant we spiked the CPU during heavy usage. Hostrocket didn't care that it wasn't our code's fault--they just wanted us off because we were choking their other websites.

I'm with everyone that doesn't want to have anything like that argument again--it hasn't been determined if the MySQL bug has been fixed, and PostgreSQL testing got derailed.

eta: That's my guess, ND. I asked them for an estimate, and will post the answer.


Dana - Mar 03, 2007 2:19:58 pm PST #1130 of 4673
I'm terrifically busy with my ennui.

Should we do a check of the kitty? Jesse?


Jesse - Mar 03, 2007 2:24:26 pm PST #1131 of 4673
Sometimes I trip on how happy we could be.

We have that kind of money on hand, but it will just mean we'll need more sooner. Maybe I'll do a tax refund ask...


Rob - Mar 03, 2007 2:36:12 pm PST #1132 of 4673

it hasn't been determined if the MySQL bug has been fixed

There's a claim it's been fixed, but that's no reason to go back to a shared host again. I'm sure there's another problem waiting after that one.


§ ita § - Mar 03, 2007 2:38:27 pm PST #1133 of 4673
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

Which MySQL release would that put the fix in?

Though I do agree--shared is just one VIP visit away from trauma.


Rob - Mar 03, 2007 2:40:59 pm PST #1134 of 4673

Which MySQL release would that put the fix in?

[Editing because that came out more brusque than I wanted]

I don't, but I can spend a few minutes trying to find out if you'd like.


§ ita § - Mar 03, 2007 3:12:22 pm PST #1135 of 4673
Well not canonically, no, but this is transformative fiction.

Don't worry--just idle curiosity, really. I'll track it down myself when I have a moment.

Unrelated to that, in terms of board development, I tried to strip the formatting out into CSS, and did reasonably completely. Well, unless you use IE. Could not position that posting box for the life of me.

If you'd like to see what it looks like, it's at css.buffistas.net. It runs on the same database as the main site does, so you log in the same way and see the same stuff.

I know there are fixes that need to be made to the board's code, but this CSS stuff has been sitting there for a few months, and I'd hate to have the development tree fork dramatically. So I would appreciate formatting feedback--it will not be exactly the same, but I hope it will still be as streamlined and readable. These changes will make it easier to skin the site for stripped down browsers in phones and PDAs, for instance. Or to take graphics out (I've been using a modified style sheet that's mostly black and white, no graphics other than the form buttons) to make it more work-friendly.

The next step would be to move the code around to isolate the content generation from the presentation, if that makes sense. When showthread calls for the posts on a given page, they come back already HTMLed up. That's not philosophically all right, although it's been serving us plenty well so far. Moving things around will make further development easier, especially when it comes to farming bits out to members of a coding team.

Wow. That was a lot longer than I intended. Go. Have a look at the new version. Talk to me about it.


Kevin - Mar 03, 2007 3:14:17 pm PST #1136 of 4673
Never fall in love with somebody you actually love.

Though I do agree--shared is just one VIP visit away from trauma.

From experience, yes and no to that. I used HostGator for a while, although they suffered issues periodically. UH have been exceptionally good over the years, and I'm happy enough with the stability of them for my sites. It's working out at around 99.5%, which is fine for me.

I used to have the various sites I run on dedicated, and if I had the money still I'd keep it that way. Although I had to do all the server admin stuff myself, which was a pain.

It does seem a bit wacky that the hosts want to upgrade you to CentOS 3.x, which is quite old. Although Redhat 7.3 is really ancient, so it's better.