Finally…
Though the title, and the fact that you're here now, says enough already, I am happy to announce my new server and websites are back up at yet another new host.
Over the next few days, I'll be tweaking things, updating my core WordPress and Drupal installations, and causing general mayhem throughout my entire environment. My monitoring systems need to be overhauled completely and until then I will not have any good monitoring in place.
Let me know if you experience any odd issues--I haven't changed anything in any of my databases or files on the new server, so it's possible something won't work right until it's updated. Although I've kept all paths identical to avoid many such issues.
CakePHP Project: WebManager
I have started work on a solution to a problem I have been searching for for quite a while. Finding nothing that satisfied me, a while back I started development on a new CakePHP project titled WebManager (DE WebManager to be precise).
The functionality will include the ability to manage the entirety of a business or individual's web presense, from domain names and websites to providers, datacenters, servers, and more. Manage them all in one place and interact with them in intelligent ways--get renewal reminders, login links to all services, relevant contact information displayed on related pages, and much more.
This project came about because I was tired of having to manage my various web assets in all different disconnected places--my registrar for domain names, my various hosting providers and control panels, all of my websites, pages, and projects around the web, and more. It was all just getting to be too much, and while there are a lot of organizational tools, none of them seemed to be designed for this specific type of management. In this, I saw a way to make something that works better for me.
The project is built with CakePHP 1.3, the MooTools Javascript framework, and the MochaUI interface to give users a full desktop-like experience on the web.
I am not sure yet what different versions I will offer, and whether this will be a locally-hosted product or SaaS (Software as a Service) hosted and provided by the Digital Empire. Only time will tell, and I should hopefully have some screenshots and more information posted soon.
Known Server Issues
No need to inform me about the following server issues, which I apologize in advance for:
- CPU time to generate some WordPress and Drupal pages is surpassing 30 seconds. I am actively looking into this and suspect it's some sort of VPS issue with queue times. This is my top priority.
- Caching is not working properly. No pages are being cached on most of my sites. The pages are still working fine, but because of the above performance issue this can become excruciating. I will have caching working properly by the time the previous issue is resolved.
- Our CDN is not set up correctly. We are using SimpleCDN to host many of our static assets, for performance reasons. It is correctly pulling most assets automatically, however you will notice some pictures in our posts are broken, and other links may not work quite right yet. This is being worked on actively as well.
If you have noticed anything other than these three problems, please let me know so I can work on those as well. I am assessing the entire Digital Empire infrastructure which is why things are taking longer than they otherwise would, but the end result should be a more stable, much faster network.
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Transition to new domain name
As you have likely noticed, my blog is now running on http://technologykills.com.
Links pointing to the old URL of http://blog.benmcclure.com will still work, but will all forward to the http://technologykills.com homepage. To fix, simply change your links to point to http://technologykills.com instead, and they will work like they did before.
If you notice any quirks or issues with the site running in its new location, let me know and I will work to resolve it immediately.
Thanks for sticking with me during this transition!
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Apache issues resolved, sites back online
Yes, finally, with a little help from the cPanel team, I got Apache/PHP to rebuild correctly, and my sites are again working properly!
Of course, I am still working on the slowness issue. Even with page caching, Apache and suPHP thrash the CPU for several seconds the first time a large dynamic page is loaded. I'm trying to narrow this down to either server configuration or a VPS issue.
I have definitely experienced this before on an over-allocated VMware array, so it's a possibility my web server is just on a busy host box. But I'm still tuning things on the server and trying to minimize the load in every way I can, because more often than not these things are caused by configuration oversight or lack of proper tuning (and user naivety perhaps, in my case).
Site back up again after a couple days
All sites hosted on nebula.desystem.net were down for a couple of days due to a server issue when attempting to update Apache/PHP.
This has just been resolved, and all should be back online to stay.
Finally got my new blog up!
Yes, yes; I have finally put something potentially useful on my homepage, which has been a completely useless and crappy 1&1 Blog site for over a year now.
Starting now, I will be posting here about anything and everything.
Stuff about games, computers and technology, my music, writing, random notes, pissed off rages, and more...
Stay tuned!