Thursday, November 11, 2004

Last Saturday, I went to BloggerCon III at Stanford. It was an interesting conference with a format that could promote a discussion of a wide range of topics. In reality, however, most of the sessions that I attended quickly focused in on one or two topics with opposing camps arguing points of view. To that end, it wasn't very enlightening. That is not to say I didn't enjoy it. But I guess that I was hoping for more. I sat in on the Academia, Journalism, Mobile Blogging, and Making Money sessions. I had an epiphany in the Mobile Blogging session when someone asked about using a cell phone to create audio-blogs. I realized that I have all of the tools to do this now. PhoneValet supports caller ID, answers my phone, and records messages to disk. Radio Userland ftps files dropped into particular folders to my server and handles my blog posts. To get a mobile audio-blog working, I would need an AppleScript that checks incoming calls, if they are from my cell phone, it would then move the audio file to my audio-blog folder, where Radio would ftp the file to my server. The script then needs to create a post in Radio and provide an enclosure link to the new audio-blog. I am going to play with this when I get a chance. 4:36:49 PM     Comment []

Monday, July 26, 2004

Userland is getting into the Frontier/Manila hosting business Priced at $1099 complete (even less for qualifying academic institutions), no other content management system combines the capabilities, usability, and value of UserLand Manila. For those users who don't require their own in-house system, UserLand now offers Hosted Manila enabling low-cost, high-impact hosted websites with all the power and functionality of Manila starting as low as $299 per year. In addition, for those organizations desiring help getting started with a new Manila system, our Professional Services Group is ready to assist with project scoping, installation, customization and training... Interesting. So, finally Userland is getting into the hosting business (again). After cutting down on all their free hosting services (editthispage, manilasite,...) over the last few years, Userland is now trying to set up a new income source through hosting its Frontier/Manila package. [Sebastian Fiedler] Interesting news, ES Designs now has a hosting competitor that is charging premium rates. At Userland's prices, they must be focusing on users who don't think the can get an enterprise weblog solution for under $1100. For the rest of us, ES Designs and other Manila hosting services provide hosting at rates that are far more affordable for small business, non-profit and educational groups. Check us out. Thanks to editHere.com for developing and maintaining this list 10:55:44 PM     Comment []

Saturday, July 10, 2004

We made weblogs at school Now this is kind of cool. The BBC reports on the Hangleton Junior School weblogs. ES Designs hosts these weblogs. I guess that we are helping make school a little more interesting for 10 year olds. Of course, the big kudus go to Peter Ford at Weblogs4Schools for teaching schools how to set up weblogs. I am glad that we have been help by providing a reliable hosting platform. 7:13:51 PM     Comment []

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Here are a couple of new posts on the ES Designs News site: Recent Consulting have been doing a little Radio Userland consulting for the online addition of The Hook, a weekly newspaper in Charlottesville, VA. What this local newspaper is doing with Radio is pretty impressive... Performance Issues Revisited After a long search through Frontier's code and some help from Steve Hooker on the Manila-dev email list, I discovered the source of the performance issues on my server... 2:06:46 PM     Comment []

Thursday, February 19, 2004

This past week we had a problem with one of the sites on the De Anza Faculty website. It started generating errors: Sorry! There was an error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "276" hasn't been defined Reload: Sorry! There was an error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "1060" hasn't been defined. Reload: Sorry! There was an error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "1168" hasn't been defined The strange thing was that I made a copy of the site and put it up on another server and it worked fine there. After spending a day trying to find the problem with no success, I took an axe to the problem. Since I had a working copy of the site locally, I deleted the site on the server, then reinstalled it from my local copy. The site is now working perfectly. Sometimes, all you need is an axe. 5:41:53 PM     Comment []

Thursday, February 12, 2004

I just added a new plugin for ES Designs' hosting clients. The favicon plugin allows managing editors to add favicons to their top level sites. The interface is very simple, just select a favicon file on your local computer and click on the add button. The favicon will now appear in the address bar of most modern web browsers. 1:58:06 PM     Comment []

Friday, January 16, 2004

This is the second installment of my discussion on Manila best practices. In the first, I discussed server hardware. Today I want to look at server maintenance. Server Maintenance The chief source of problems for Manila servers is the loss of speed in accessing the databases that back the Manila application. Over time as data moves in and out of the databases, they get larger and it takes longer to find and process data needed to server Manila pages. Compacting the databases using Frontier's "Save A Copy..." command will reduce the size of the database, speed data acquisition, which in-turn speeds the servers response. Compacting Frontier's databases is a processor intensive task and you will not be able to server files during compaction. Also, you will need to compact multiple databases for optimal speed improvements. For this reason, you should turn off the webserver before you start compacting databases. Otherwise, you could receive a request between "Save A Copy" that alters a database that you have already compacted. You cannot "Save A Copy" over an existing database while Frontier is running. So you must save the compacted database to a new location, then quit Frontier and right over the existing database with the compacted version. As you can see compacting your databases can be a long and arduous process. Depending on the size of your databases and the frequency that you compact them, it can take your webserver offline for several to tens of minutes. With a decent maintenance schedule and reasonably-sized databases you should be able to limit your servers downtime to under 5 minutes. So which databases should you compact. At a minimum you should compact config.root. and manilaWebsites.root (and any other website databases). These are the databases that will change most frequently and are most likely impacting server performance. If you are running the news aggregator, aggregatorData.root is also a good candidate. The application databases, Frontier.root, mainresponder.root, and manila.root don't seem to change that much overtime, but it won't hurt to compact them. Any tool or plugin that frequently writes and deletes data, should be routinely compacted. My current approach is to compact all of Frontier's open databases. This is overkill, but it is easier to script than a solution that compacts some open databases and not others. From the discussion above, you should see that while it is a necessary maintenance step, it is a pain to compact databases. It is definitely one that calls for a scripted solution. I am currently testing a pair of scripts to handle this maintenance. The first script is in Frontier, it turns off the webserver, compacts all of the open databases to a set location (a directory within the Frontier directory), and then calls an external script. The external script (written in AppleScript), quits Frontier, moves the compacted databases to their correct locations within the Frontier directory, then restarts Frontier. These scripts are currently running nightly on my development server. My plan is to run them weekly on my production Manila server. I should be able to specify a weekly downtime to my clients. I will report back as I get more data. 3:22:13 PM     Comment []

I am seeing a strange problem with the comments link. They don't work when I click on them from my primary computer, but they do when I click on them from my development box (which sits two feet away). Strange. Anyway I was wondering if anyone else was having problems with the comments link on Fluid Flow. 11:52:38 AM     Comment []

I have released a new Manila plugin for my ES Designs hosting clients. The stencilEditor plugin allows Managing Editors modify the appearance of many of my custom macros output. I have mentioned stencils here before and how they make my life easier, since I don't have to dive in the macro code to make changes to the appearance of the macros output. Through the stencilEditor plugin, I can give Managing Editors the same ability to modify the appearance. 9:52:31 AM     Comment []