It seems the new server, Geryon, suffered a catastrophic hardware failure over Easter (2010-04-04).  It appeared to have gone down at around ~11am, and was down for the rest of the day and continued to be down until Monday.  The operating system was reinstalled and the main website (CrazedSanity.com) was restored, but the server suffered another catastrophic failure that night.

Two hard drive failures were the cause.  While the server was setup to handle a single drive failure, it simply could not handle two at the same time.  Unfortunately, there was no backup system in place, so a few months worth of work was simply obliterated.  Thankfully, it seems very little data of actual value was lost, though there is no way of truly determining just what was available to be lost.

 An old backup of CrazedSanity.com (and BuzzKill.org) has been restored, along with an old copy of the database.  Thankfully, I hadn't quite decommissioned the old server (Poseidon), which is now the production server until Geryon can be fixed.

As it stands, here is the list of items that need to be done (I'll try to update this as soon as things get completed):

1. CrazedSanity.com
   1. svn (pending)
   2. www (done)
   3. project (done)
2. BuzzKill.org (done)
3. CS-Project.com (pending)
4. DigitalImpacts.com (pending)
5. UmbralFantasy.com (pending)

It seems there was an error when going to a user's blog (instead of an individual entry.  For instance, going to "/blog/help" would generate an error; going to "/blog" was okay, and so was "/blog/help/user_blog_list_fixed".

The problem has now been resolved.  It was a logic problem that occurred when implementing RSS functionality.  If you have any questions, comments, or want a feature, please let me know.

Intended Future Capabilities

As you may have guessed, there are still more features to come.  I am but one person, and I haven't found a way to bend the space/time continuum to my will, and as such haven't been able to increase the number of hours in my day as compared to everyone else.  As time permits, the following features are intented to be added to blogs (in no particular order):

• better timestamp options
• future entry creation (date entry for the future, only shows once that date is not in the future)
• comments
  • authenticated users
  • "anonymous" (requires implementation of anti-spam measures)
• isolated user image folders
• entry tagging
• renaming/deleting entries

This tutorial covers the basics of blogging on CrazedSanity.com.  It is not a complete reference to every possible action available by any means, nor is it intended to be: the idea is to cover the basics and areas where users might have issues or questions.

The images have been modified to (hopefully) only point out those areas that are of importance, and obscuring the unimportant stuff.  If you think they suck, let me know why and your thoughts on how to fix them.

Accessing Your Blog

	After you've logged-in, click the "Members Area" link in the upper-right corner of the page.
Now click on "Edit My Blog(s)".

Your blog probably won't be as massive as this list (that's my list of blogs).  In fact, you won't have any to begin with, but you can change that after reading this tutorial!  Anyway, at this point, it is important to understand what everything means.

See those icons?  You know, that spyglass () and pencil ()?  Click the spyglass to view your entry (this is the link everyone else will use, known as the "permalink"), or click the pencil to edit the entry.  The green plus symbol () is what's really important: cick that to create a new blog.

Editing (and Creating) Blogs

Now you should know the basics of getting to your blog and what all the links mean.  Now it's time to actually do something.

New Entry

	Okay, its time to create your first entry (or maybe not, and you're here to get a refresher course).  Click the green plus symbol () beside your blog.  A new screen will come up, allowing you to create your very first entry (the blurred-out stuff isn't important).
	Once you create the entry, it will bring you to its permalink.  Just click the "Edit Entry" link at the bottom of the post to continue editing it.  Note that if you've saved it as a draft, there will still be a box for saving as a draft; as soon as you uncheck that box and save it, you will not have an option to save it as a draft anymore.

Adding Images

To jazz up your entries, you can always add an image.  See that little button that isn't smudged away?  That's the image button. There's some interesting things involved with adding images, so let's get started.
When that little image button is clicked, an "Image Properties" window [1] opens up.  If it is on another server, or even already on this server, you can link to it with the full URL.
Now, if you want to upload a file, there are some "gotchas".  First off, don't bother clicking on that "Upload" tab in the main page: as it is broken (and gives a false sense of security); instead, click the "Browse Server" button on that main tab. You will be presented with a window similar to the one here.  Did you notice there's subfolders there?  Well, you can make one too, just to separate your images from everyone else's.  If you do create a folder, be sure to click into that folder.
Click the "Browse..." button.   A standard "select a file" type window will appear.  Find that file and click "Ok"[2].
As you can see, the URL will show up, along with a preview. If you change the width, the height will automatically change so your picture doesn't get distorted.
It is a good idea to put some sort of descriptive text into that "Alternative Text" block, too.  That is the text that appears if you hold your cursor over an image.
In order for that text to appear for some browsers (like Firefox), you'll have to click the "Advanced" tab and paste that text into the "Advisory Title" box.

^[1] It isn't really another window , actually it is just an overlay.  The key difference being, essentially, that you can't ALT+TAB between it and the main window, 'cuz they're not actually separate windows.  So its not really a huge difference to most people, but this little detail might trip you up otherwise.

^[2] I didn't give a screenshot here on purpose, as it will depend upon what operating system you are using... and yes, there actually is another operating system out there that is not Windows: it is called Linux: check out Kubuntu, as I've been told by others that it is pretty user-friendly.

Your blogs can now appear automatically on other sites, like Facebook.  I've updated the blogs so RSS (Really Simple Syndication) works.

Basically, if you want to get the feed, the syntax is http://www.crazedsanity.com/blog/yourblogname/my.blog.rss.xml -- the last part ("my.blog.rss.xml) doesn't really matter, as long as it ends with ".xml".  To see what it looks like (depending upon your browser), check out my blog's feed.

If you've got a Facebook account and a CrazedSanity.com account with a blog, you can enable automatic feeds pretty easily.  Note that these steps probably aren't the only way:

1. Open Facebook
2. Click your name at the top of the page
3. Under the "Share" button, click the little "Options" link
4. Click "Settings"
5. Under "Imported Stories", click "Blog/RSS"
6. Type in the appropriate URL as previously indicated
7. Click "Update" (or whatever the button says)
8. Done! (assuming it worked)

If you have issues with this fairly experimental feature, contact me.

For an unknown period of time, the links for editing blogs (and creating new ones) didn't work.  This problem has been resolved, and I am working on finding the cause.

This problem appears to revolve around a problem with parsing template vars in the CS-Content system, though I've not been able to find the problem.  I believe it has something to do with parsing template vars inside of parsed template rows... but that's just a guess (not as though that explanation means much to anybody but me...).

In a recent post, I mentioned that there are some planned upgrades in the works.  I am happy to say that the first part of those upgrades is now complete, in the form of a new server.  That server, as you may have guessed, has been named Poseidon.  I chose the name because Charybdis is the name of the current server (its second incarnation, I might add), and Scylla is the name of my router (also a second incarnation).  I figured the next logical progression was to go for something that links those two... if you don't know how Poseidon links Scylla and Charybdis, you need to do some reading on Wikipedia or something.

Over the next few weeks I will be migrating services from one server to another.  This will probably be the slowest part, so don't expect any major changes to happen right away.  Here's the list of things to accomplish, in no particular order:

• Migrate DNS
• Migrate PostgreSQL databases
  • copy to Poseidon
  • point Charybdis' services to Poseidon
  • turn off PostgreSQL on Charybdis
•  Setup Apache on Poseidon
  
  • PHP + PostgreSQL & MySQL
  • misc PHP packages
• Move web hosts to Poseidon
• Move Subversion to Poseidon
• Move scheduled jobs (cron tab) to Poseidon)

Registration for CrazedSanity.com is now available.  It worked to a point before, and some courageous users even went through the process and waited patiently for me to activate their accounts.  Well, now it is complete.

Keep in mind that, while there's a link to edit your blogs, there isn't a system to set that up automatically.  If you'd like to have a blog, email me.

Site Slowness Resolved

For the last few days (on or after the 22nd), you may have noticed a significant slow-down with CrazedSanity.com.  All the other domains, such as BuzzKill.org or the CS-Project site, all worked just fine.

The reason for this was due to a configuration problem.  I was fixing a problem remotely which required a change in the main configuration file: normally I remember to make the appropriate changes before making it live, but it seems I had forgotten the last time.  This caused the server to have to do a lot of extra lookups that caused latencies of around 10 seconds (normally the site serves up in less than 1-2).

I've implemented some very minor page logging that will help me track page latencies: I now track the time of the request vs. the time the page finishes loading (which is just after the logging happens).  Hopefully this can help me track down a few other problems as well.  The logging appears to make zero discernible difference to the site's overall performance, so I believe I'll leave it  permanently, though the logging system will probably be overhauled to make that process easier.

Planned Upgrade

In the coming weeks I will be working on building a new (donated) server for CrazedSanity.com..  It should provide much more horsepower with its faster processor and much more RAM.  The current site is running on a 600Mhz PIII with a 256M of RAM (yeah, I know thats kinda pathetic, but Linux makes that count for a hell of a lot more).  The new server will be running on a 2Ghz Celeron with ~480M of RAM (which may be upgraded before the final move).  It's not a massively powerful server, but it is more powerful than Charybdis (the current server), and let's not forget that it was donated.

I know most of you probably didn't notice, but CrazedSanity had some issues for a while: a few of the pages ("Links" and "Contact Us") displayed the wrong content for a while.  Instead of showing their unique content, they display the main page info (news feeds & such).  Well, that's fixed!  I know, you're so excited you almost jumped out of your britches right?

Anyway, despite these changes, there have also been some major updates to the backend systems that I thought I'd let ya know about... you might want to sit down for this one.

First, authentication is checked dynamically.  Yeah.  I'm talkin' AJAX, yo!  Signing in and stuff are (mostly) done through AJAX, so there's no need to reload the page.  I KNOW!  It's AWESOME!

Did you notice the little weather image stays pretty up-to-date?  It actually reloads (through some spiffy AJAX-ish Javascriptiness) every 20 minutes, which is about how long it takes between changes on Weather Underground.  So if you opened the website at 8:22 AM and look at it later, you should notice that the time on the image is within 20 minutes of being current!  Yeah, I know... be careful not to spill your coffee.

Yes, I'm still working on registration.  It sort of works... kinda.  You can register an account, and it'll send you an email, but activation isn't working yet (at the time of this writing anyway).  Its a rather small thing to get working, and it will work someday... but not just yet.

With these backend updates, I will soon be able to do some cool things with blogs.  Yeah.  I know there a buttload of ya that blog... There's like FOUR... okay, there's only two if I count actual people instead of blogs... Anyway, when you're in the middle of a blog, I'll be able to do cool things like background draft saves.  Yeah.  So if you accidentally hit that stupid extra button on your mouse that you didn't even know existed and it sends you back a page, you won't lose what you have.

It seems that CrazedSanity.com (and BuzzKill.org) has been unavailable for a few days.  I'd like to just update everybody on what actually happened.

First off, the servers have been online during the whole time.  The problem turned out to be that the IP address that my router had been assigned from our local ISP had changed, so my DNS servers (which are sadly attached to that IP) weren't accessible.  The IP address that they had given out and that other DNS servers had cached was still the old one, so they were trying to contact my webserver somewhere that it didn't exist.

So you're probably wondering, "Why did it take so long for you to figure this out, Slaughter?"  There were actually several factors that caused the problem.  First, my contract at the Capitol (ITD) ended on the 31st, so I didn't have my laptop--I didn't get a new laptop until Thursday--so I was pretty much offline for a full day.  Once I did get the laptop, it wasn't configured properly as I'd asked, so I had to spend the rest of that night configuring it (since I had homework, I didn't bother checking the website).  When I saw the website wasn't contactable, I figured it was probably something wonky with how the laptop was configured (it was Windows, after all).

Later I found out that no other machines in the house could get to my website.  Since I'd been tinkering with the router (fiddling with DMZ, port forwarding, and DNS), I figured maybe I'd done something to make stuff in the internal network not be able to lookup the server's address.  The next day I found out that others couldn't bring up my website either. 

Anyway, long story short, my router's IP address changed, so DNS was caching the wrong IP.  Since it couldn't get to my DNS server, it couldn't be corrected.  I changed the IP address associated with my name server, but I found out a day later that the change wasn't actually submitted (thanks, GoDaddy).  I checked it from work today and it worked just fine, which is why you're able to read this message.  :)

Ever wondered why our feed from The Register seems to always end with a question mark?  Well, it appears as though they use special characters to show their ellipses (you know, the three dots "...", but they use just one character to represent that), which appears as a question mark to browsers... well, at least to most browsers.  I would imagine browsers that use different localization encodings might display it properly.

It's not a very high priority, but the problem has been noted.  I'll do my best to find a solution as soon as I can.

As noted on Slaughter's Blog, the new feeds are up.  Right now I'm pulling feeds from Xbox-Scene, The Register, Slashdot, and from CIA.vc (which has a feed that shows the latest commits by me on all of my projects).  The feed download itself seems to be working just fine, though the parser that drops the articles into the database was having some problems (which now seem to be resolved).

The RSS Feed system is actually now an open source project, called "cs-rssdb"; you can check out the as-yet incomplete project at at SourceForge.net.  Since this is built to be run on many websites, I had to work out some generic configuration settings and remove my customizations.

There are a few things missing from when I had just the Slashdot feed.  For instance, the number of comments have been removed, along with the "department" and the layout customizations.  I'm still working on how to implement those customizations on a per-feed basis.  Drop me a line if you have any suggestions!

In the last update to CS-Blogger, I enabled a bunch more editor options that include a lot more formatting capabilities.  And probably the most anticipated feature, file uploads are now available. 

Here is my first uploaded image:

Yeah, it's a bit of propaganda for CS-Project... but what do you expect?  Anyway, I'm still working on some integration issues with CS-Blogger and FCKEditor (that's the software that provides that pretty editor interface... I know, I know, you thought I made all that).

UPDATE: There are still a few bugs in the file upload system, so the first screen that appears when ya click the "image" button lies about uploading successfully.  For now, click the "browse server" button, then use the form at the bottom to upload the image (it'll show up in the window above the form immediately.

Buzzkill.org has now been setup to use Google Apps, just like CrazedSanity.com.  There are a few changes that need to be made on my side in order to complete the transfer.  It should be completely available in a few days; if you have an email address that you'd like to setup, or if you want an address @buzzkill.org to forward to your main email address, just send me an email!

UPDATE: The following services have been added (via Google Apps) to BuzzKill.org:

• A cool start page
• Chat amongst CrazedSanity.com email users (not sure how that works yet)..
• Google Docs
• Calendar
• Sites (still working on the usefulness of that one)

A fatal error with the blogger (cs-blogger) has been resolved.  After some preliminary testing, it turned out that a bit of code wasn't updated when handling a single record from the database; since I have access to multiple blogs, I was unaffected (and unaware) of the problem.  Prophet discovered the issue today, and it was resolved just a few hours later: it took several hours to track down the problem (it was apparently too obvious for me).

That's right, email for the CrazedSanity.com domain is alive again!  The mailserver has been effectively offline since November, when I left my job at AvSupport (I was using their mailserver for my domains).

"What does Gmail have to do with anything," you ask?  Well, that part requires a bit of an explanation, so you know how I found this solution.

I was reading through a Slashdot article about Email-only Providers, since I was in need of a new email server/solution.  One of the suggestions referred to Google Apps as a solution... of course, being an avid user of Gmail, I figured I'd take a look.

After looking through the offering, I found out how to setup my domain to use Google Apps   Not only does CrazedSanity.com have an email provider, but it also has a very advanced webmail interface!  Other cool things include:

• A cool start page
• Chat amongst CrazedSanity.com email users (not sure how that works yet)..
• Google Docs
• Calendar
• Sites (still working on the usefulness of that one)

Anyway, it's all working again.  For those of you that are interested in setting up an email address @crazedsanity.com, just send me an email.

The issue with sessions (i.e. cookies) expiring prematurely has been fixed.  The cookie's expiration was set to 120 days, but for some reason after a few hours the session would expire and the user would be logged-out.  After some searching, I found a bit of old code where the session would be forcefully destroyed after 2 hours of idleness; I've since upped that limit to 2 days.  Remember: all you have to do to make the cooke "non-idle" is to simply visit this website (if you've got it set as your homepage, it'll be refreshed).

Testers Still Needed

Beta testers for the blogger system are still needed!  Go to the Contact Us page to contact me about getting your own blog!

The new blogger interface needs to be tested.  I have created and tested new entries as much as I can, but many times the original developer of a system will unconsciously work around bugs without even realizing it; this is why I need to have other users test the system.

Why should I help?  If you're interested in blogging, this would be a great place to start.  Right now, the system only allows for textual entries, but it will eventually include the ability to upload and display images--but this ability will only be added if enough people are interested in testing this system.  If you are interested in having a blog and testing this new system, please contact me.

The custom blogger interface is finally nearing completion!  For now, I've setup a private BETA test, while a few final problems are worked out.  During this time, I hope to find any bugs that might have been left and fix them.  Here's the list of things that need to be completed before a public BETA is available:

• User registration
• Account modifications
• Ability to create new blogs (there's an issue with some code that can't seem to create writable directories on the server).
• Lost password system
• Editor interface with only those options that actually work

There are a few other features that are in the works as well:

• Anonymous (and non-anonymous) commenting on blogs
• Ability to upload images to display within blogs
• Store drafts (allows for previewing without saving entries)