Sometime during the middle of the night, the server somehow stopped being able to find one of the perl modules it uses.

I have no idea how that could have happened; it's a read-only file. I guess the file got corrupted somehow.

I rebuilt the perl module and now it's working again. Go figure.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

The Dodger Thoughts game threads have been a good test for the Fairpole software.

At one point yesterday during the Dodger game, the CPU started working a little too hard. So today, I installed a new version that has a couple of changes:

1. Comments are now cached, instead of hitting the database for each page load.

2. When the number of comments gets over 50, the comments become collapsable, in groups of 50.

The changes looked good on the CPU load, until Jose Valentin hit that triple in the 10th inning, and the CPU went berserk again. So obviously, I still have some debugging to do. There's a bug somewhere, and today's changes have done only lowered the odds that we'll encounter the bug. It didn't kill the bug.

I have bounced the web server several times today. Something is gobbling up more CPU time than it should, and I'm trying to debug what it is, so I can fix it.

So if you get a "Connection refused" error, or something like that, be patient. I won't let the server be down for more than a minute or two at a time.

I may also "shut off" parts of the sites at different times, in order to track down the culprit. Again, I'll only do this for a minute or two, so if you see something weird, just try again in a minute.

Thanks for your patience.

My first priority right now is to get the blogging software into a satisfactory state, so that I can move on to the fun stuff.

So with that goal in mind, here's a list of things I will try to implement in the next version of Fairpole.

• Persistent cookies for login
• Better registration error message when name is not available
• Create a separate "HTML output module", to handle formatting of
  blog entries, sidebars, comments, etc.
  This will incorporate the following:
  
  • Bugs:
    
    • & and   not saving properly
    • tables not displaying properly with auto-breaks
    • not saving line break status for blog entries
  • Features:
    
    • allow urls, italics, and other HTML-like features in comments
    • javascript buttons to format them
• Sidebar ordering
• Fix IE textarea bug for blog entry box
• Blog entry previews
• Fairpole Disclaimer
• editable # of entries per page
• link "Baseball Toaster (beta)" to the homepage
• Refresh button for the "Hot" list
• Various CSS/template tweaks

Here are some things on my to-do list, that I'm probably not going to put in the next version:

• preventing double posts on comments
• search
• autolinking
• spell check
• tool to edit/delete comments,ban commenters
• Toaster homepage editor
• import old comments

The server was down for about an hour Tuesday evening.

We were experiencing severe network packet loss again, worse than last week. This time, our ISP was able to figure out the problem, and correct it.

So we're finally down to 0% packet loss. Hopefully, it will stay that way.

If it does, and the site still seems slow, now it will actually be my fault. Yay!