Category: Site News

As you can obviously see, the site is in the process of being upgraded to a newer version of NucleusCMS. As usual, only after I have started the upgrade, I found out that there is a bug in the backup script provided with the program. That turned into a few interesting hours, when the site was running a combination of few versions of the same software.

Fortunately, all vital info was saved by a number of backup attempts and an extended scripting session. For now, there are few bugs left to squash – comments, fancy URLs, styles (especially image-related stuff).

Update (20 Jun 2004, 01:13pm): I am still fighting with the damn thing. This is one of the painful software upgrades I have done in few years. Lots of bugs. Lots of patching. Off for some sleep. :)

I have added a new category to the blog – “Site issues“. It will contain all posts that have to deal with server downtimes, configuration and design changes, new functionality announcements, etc. I’ve also moved few of the old posts on the subject in there.

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Every change to a structure of the website brings one of two things – either an increase in the number of “Not Found” pages also known as 404, or an increase in the mess with redirection files, which move visitors from old locations to new ones. Every time there is a choice to be made in favour of one or the other.

After a recent reorganization of photo albums I’ve noticed an increase in the 404s in the logs. It gave me the opprotunity to think about the issue once again, and I decided to change the configuration of my web server, which runs on Apache, to redirect from any missing file to the root of the site. All had to do add this line:

ErrorDocument 404 /

to the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file and restart the daemon.

This step, of course, doesn’t guarantee that those who seek for something specific will find it, but it sure does improve the chances.

So there’ll be no more 404s on this server! Enjoy browsing. :)

There was a minor downtime today, but you shouldn’t have noticed anything. Apparently, last time when I was fixing sound on the server, I misplaced the IDE RAID controller card. Since then there was no music in my house. Today I got really bored with it and the number of requests from my wife approached the critical number, so I decided to fix it.

Overall, the machine was down for about 5-10 minutes. Everything is in perfect condition now and I am not expecting any other downtimes any time soon. Enjoy. :)

I’ve been getting slowly annoyed by JAlbum. It is slow and inefficient. Every time I add an album, it has to go through all previous albums. It has memory leaks and dies easily. The worst part is that I cannot do anything about it. I don’t know Java and, what is worst, I don’t have the source.

So I decided to switch back to album from Dave’s Marginal Hacks. It has it’s own pros and cons, but at least it is written in Perl and it is Open Source.

While I was at it, I decided to restructure a bit my photo storage. With the Digital Rebel it was getting crowded there. So I separated albums by years. I have uploaded all the links that I could find (even some posts on the forums), but there is still a chance that you might miss something. If that happens, just navigate to it through the links in the “Photos” section.

I don’t think I will change album generating software in the near future, since I am kind of fed up with moving backwards and forwards. I’ll just patch this one. :)

P.S.: If you find any broken links, please let me know so that I could fix them for other visitors. TIA.