System Information

Some time during the day on Wednesday, January 9, 2008, the webserver’s power supply stopped functioning and the site was unavailable.

Fortunately, I had a spare power supply at the house and was able to quickly repair the system and get us back online.

I apologize for the unexpected downtime!

Happy New Year, everyone! 2008 started quietly for Wendy & me. We attended a party at our friend Tracy’s house to ring in the new year with our closest friends. Then, for the next couple days, we laid low hanging around the house and enjoying two solid days of downtime. To give some small idea just how low we laid, we watched 5 movies… In one day!

During our downtime, I took the opportunity to upgrade this WordPress installation from version 2.2.3 to version 2.3.2. The upgrade went fairly smoothly, but there were some problems in our existing theme (Ngatini) which required me to use a different theme (Tarski). I am not sure if this is a temporary theme or if we’ll be sticking to it… Tarksi is a modern, good-looking, and well-supported WordPress theme.

I am in the process of tweaking the theme a bit to maximize its usefulness and integration into our site, so some things may not be working as expected yet. They should be fixed in the next several days.

Just a few days after I upgraded to the previous version of WordPress, the new version (2.2.0) comes out. I upgraded today, and it seems to be working well so far.

After thinking about it for far too long, this morning I spent some time upgrading my WordPress installation to 2.1.3, the most current version. I had to update a bunch of plugins to their most current version and then deactivate them one-by-one, install the new WordPress files, then re-activate (one-by-one — WordPress REALLY needs a batch plugin scheme!) them and tweak out the system. Everything seems to be working, but if you spot any weirdness, please let me know.

Using Mondo, I performed a comprehensive system backup today. The site was unavailable for about 25 minutes to verify the backup.

We’ve got a couple behind-the-scenes issues occuring with the website — our cache program isn’t working, sometimes the comment form seems to disappear, and there is an elusive bug with my permalinks. I’m working to fix all of these issues, so if you experience any system wonkiness, please bear with us!

UPDATE 1: The cache turns out to be functioning normally after all. A previous version would put TWO lines into the cached file indicating that it was served from the cache and the documentation still indicates this. However, the author has removed the second line, which is what I was looking for to determine if it was working.

UPDATE 2: It appears that the comment form issue is related to the page rendering in Internet Explorer or Firefox. The comment form works fine in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. We’re still working on this.

UPDATE 3: Thanks to Yosemite and Moshu from the WordPress Support forum (link above), we isolated the comment form problem to an out-of-date version of the HashCash plugin we’ve been running. Curiously, when I updated HashCash from 2.3 to 3.2, the comment form displayed properly in IE but not in Firefox — the opposite of what was happening before! As a result, I’ve disabled the HashCash plugin.

Still working on those permalinks! I’ve been directed to the documents that I believe will help. I just haven’t had time to work on it yet.