An Architect's View

In order to make it easier to find information I post about BACFUG, I have created a BACFUG category and so you can subscribe to that that category's RSS feed if you want. I have gone back and categorized all past BACFUG posts so you can easily find details of topics, dates and links to recordings (where available).

This morning I migrated the database behind my blog from a shared server onto my VPS. If you notice any strangeness, let me know. I think I got everything right (although I made a couple of errors along the way so the blog was down for about fifteen minutes - I'm a dangerous sysadmin :)

As many of you noticed (or not?), my site was offline pretty much all of today. A couple of people notified early in the day that there was a problem but I'm used to the occasional outage on a shared host so I didn't think anything of it at first. All the same, I sent an email to HostMySite support asking "wassup?" but instead of the usual (polite, helpful) email response, I got a phone call. Apparently the shared server was being brought to its knees by unusual traffic to my site (it wasn't clear exactly what - only that my site was bringing the server down again every time they tried to restart it). I'm fairly certain it was a spambot attack, possibly combined with one or more search engines trying to index my site. They wanted to move me to a better plan where I'd be more isolated from other users - understandable - and, to be honest, both Lou Honick and Neil Heuer at HostMySite have been trying to get me to move to a VPS for a while, partly because they want me to see how it performs and write about my experience I suspect. I said I was happy on shared hosting but the tech on the phone said they really wanted to move me so I told them to do whatever they felt was necessary. They said it would take several hours - to build out a new VPS and copy everything from my old site. Sure enough, throughout the afternoon, I received a steady stream of emails as parts of the infrastructure were brought up. Once I noticed the site was actually working again, I started to explore the new site admin console and see exactly what they were offering. The VPS uses the Virtuozzo Power Panel which allows you to SSH into the server (via a Java applet in a browser window) and also has a lot of system monitoring and management features. My initial impression is that it's very good. I'll write up more detailed notes in the next few days I expect. There were a couple of lingering glitches that I noticed and when I pinged support again, they called me - on my home phone - and walked me through everything I needed to know about the new setup and resolved the issues I had. I've always had very good experiences with HostMySite but today's experience was above and beyond the call of duty.

Congratulations to Chris Schmitz! He snapped the site at 999,999 and provided an exact timestamp, per the contest rules! Thank you to all the other folks who entered - I had about dozen entries in total, with half of those being within a very narrow window, around quarter past midnight!

---

Nearly 1,000,000 visitors have come to An Architect's View since I started blogging in June 2002. Dan Wilson suggested that I run a contest for the millionth visitor and then donated a prize so here's the contest! The counter, as of this posting, is at 999,409. The person who takes a screenshot of the counter when it is closest to 1,000,000 visitors and sends it to me will win the "Flex 2 Essential Training" videos from Lynda.com. But wait, you Photoshoppers... Sure, anyone can cheat. So to help prevent PhotoshopFraud, you must also send me the time you took the screenshot. This is something I can easily double check (because only I will know the timestamps on all the other screen shots submitted!). The winner will be announced a few days after the counter reaches 1,000,000 visitors (to allow for folks to get their screenshots in). The videos are being donated by Dan Wilson who is very keen for this contest to happen and, for some strange reason, really likes my blog! Many thanx to Dan. Get screen grabbing!

In the past, I've posted quite a few job openings on my blog. I get a fairly steady stream of requests to post jobs which shows how healthy ColdFusion is. I added Clark Valberg's Developer Circuit widget to my blog a good while ago - and a few weeks ago I blogged that the widget had been updated. It doesn't show a lot of jobs right now so I've decided that to promote it as a "go to" resource for CFers, I'm going to stop posting job openings on my blog and suggest that folks click on the widget to post job openings on Developer Circuit. See? There's the widget... on the left hand side of my blog, just below the categories and calendar!

Clark Valberg has just updated the Developer Circuit Flex widget that lets bloggers show jobs in the margins of their pages to help support the community. See the left nav of my blog just below the categories and calendar.

Realizing that my main layout was partially table-based after CSS Naked Day '07, I switched to a pure CSS layout tonight. I changed to a three column layout, placing primary blog navigation on the left, with everything else on the right. I also got rid of that terrible old picture of me - now you get a great photograph of Coit Tower with Alcatraz in the background courtesy of my friend (and ex-Macromedia colleague) Vern Viehe, a name some of you may remember.

Chris Phillips has finally got his act together and started blogging. Read all about his BlogCFC JavaScript Twitter pod. Good stuff Chris! Welcome to the blogosphere!

I don't know how many folks out there have my current cell phone number but it will no longer be valid after Thursday April 5th. I will eventually get a new cell phone(!) but wanted to let folks know you can contact me via my Skype number (bottom of the right hand column on my blog). In theory I could have migrated it to a personal plan and I wanted to migrate it onto my wife's existing plan. However, after spending three hours on the phone, between myself, my wife and the company that manages Adobe's cell phones, we were unable to persuade Cingular to migrate the number to any acceptable combination of plans. Cell phone companies really don't seemed to have learned about customer service yet, it seems. Also, remember that my adobe.com email address will be switched off after Thursday and you'll need to reach me via this domain (there's a "Contact me!" link in the right hand column on my blog). (Posting to coldfusion category only because I know a lot of CFers don't read the non-CF categories on my blog but might still want to know how to contact me!)

If you've been having problems accessing my site in the last few days, it's because another site sharing my server has been behaving badly. HostMySite are taking steps to remedy the problem:

The problem that you have been experiencing is ColdFusion related. As you know in a shared ColdFusion environment poor code by even a single site can cause issues server wide. This has been happening over the last few days on your server. We have informed the operators of the offending site and are currently working on either getting them to fix their code or migrate to a VPS.

-- from HostMySite support.