Down Time
Posted: Thu Feb 14, 2013 12:18 pm
So... it looks like the Wongery was down for two weeks. And nobody noticed. Including us, the Grandmaster Wongers.
Oops.
First of all, the reason I say nobody noticed is simply because, well, as far as we can tell, nobody's been visiting the site. This isn't surprising; we haven't done any advertising or, indeed, even mentioned the site elsewhere. But that's a topic for a whole separate post (and one I've been meaning to make for some time, actually).
Of more immediate concern is why we didn't notice. The fact is... yeah, we've kind of been neglecting the site. I guess it just happens that each of us had a lot going on the last few weeks, and if we were each relying on the others to keep things moving as we took a bit of a break, then... I guess that didn't work out so well, did it? And honestly, updating the Wongery hasn't been the highest of priorities, since, as noted above, nobody is visiting it anyway to see the updates. But more on that in that whole separate post I mentioned above. I'll get around to writing it soon. I swear.
Anyway, yeah, so apparently none of us even so much as tried accessing the site in the last few weeks. This is bad. While we are all busy with other things (as much as we'd like to make the Wongery a priority, the Grandmaster Wongers do, unfortunately, have to earn their livings), and we may not be able to make many updates for a while, we will at least try to keep on top of things a bit more than we have.
Case in point: The Wongery World of the Week. Which, alas, seems to have stalled out after two weeks. We had more worlds lined up for that feature... we just, uh, apparently never got around to posting the relevant articles. That will change; we'll get the next World of the Week article up some time later today, and then put up two a week, one on Monday and one on Thursday, until we're caught up. (We'll backdate them to the days they were supposed to go up, because we can do that. This is not without precedent; the first World of the Week is dated January 7, but actually didn't go up till the 8th. Because of the way the World of the Week data is stored, that's easy to do. We won't backdate the posts in the corresponding forum, though; that may be possible, but it would be much trickier. Speaking of which, I see we never did make a forum post for the second World of the Week—whoops. We'll get on that later today too. [Actually, we ended up doing that before this forum post, because we forgot to post the news in the forum. Oops. Yes, we should automate that so a news post automatically gets posted to this forum; that's... one of many, many items on our to-do list.]) Admittedly, this may seem to have a slight disadvantage in that the next few Worlds of the Week are going to get reduced time on the front page, but since, as we've mentioned several times already, nobody is visiting the site, that doesn't seem to particularly matter much at this point.
We may as well address, for the benefit of those nonexistent readers for whom I am inexplicably writing this news post, exactly why the site went down. Apparently queries to the MySQL database powering the Central Wongery were causing a server overload, so the webhost blocked the databases until the issue was resolved. While they did send me a notification of the issue, Gmail unfortunately for some reason filtered it as spam, so I didn't see it. Blocking the database brought down not only the Central Wongery but most of the site as well, including the front page, because the other pages relied on those databases to parse Wiki syntax in news posts and to fetch and display the random article in the sidebar. (The Public Wongery and the forum remained accessible, but that wasn't of much use without the rest of the site.) In any case, to be honest I'm still not sure what was causing the problem. I think it may be that the overload was actually primarily caused by a different site I have hosted with the same account and that the Wongery's database just got tarred with the same brush. If that's the case, now that the issue with the other site has been resolved (at least for the moment), there should be no further problems with the Wongery. If that's not the case, though, then when the hosting company checks their statistics again tomorrow... the database may be blocked again, and the site will go back down. In that case, probably the only way I can get it back up will be to switch my shared hosting plan to a dedicated hosting plan. But I'm the one paying for the hosting, and I'm not likely to be able to afford such a switch for some time... not until mid-March at least. So... well, if the Wongery goes down again, that's likely to be why. But hopefully it won't come to that.
Regardless, we may have been away for a while, but we haven't given up on the Wongery. Other issues may have been getting in the way lately, but we do have big plans for this site. It's going to keep going, and it's going to grow. So keep checking back later. (Which it would make a lot more sense to say if anyone had, in fact, been checking on the site at all, but, eh, you get the idea. Whoever the "you" is that this post is addressed to.)
Oops.
First of all, the reason I say nobody noticed is simply because, well, as far as we can tell, nobody's been visiting the site. This isn't surprising; we haven't done any advertising or, indeed, even mentioned the site elsewhere. But that's a topic for a whole separate post (and one I've been meaning to make for some time, actually).
Of more immediate concern is why we didn't notice. The fact is... yeah, we've kind of been neglecting the site. I guess it just happens that each of us had a lot going on the last few weeks, and if we were each relying on the others to keep things moving as we took a bit of a break, then... I guess that didn't work out so well, did it? And honestly, updating the Wongery hasn't been the highest of priorities, since, as noted above, nobody is visiting it anyway to see the updates. But more on that in that whole separate post I mentioned above. I'll get around to writing it soon. I swear.
Anyway, yeah, so apparently none of us even so much as tried accessing the site in the last few weeks. This is bad. While we are all busy with other things (as much as we'd like to make the Wongery a priority, the Grandmaster Wongers do, unfortunately, have to earn their livings), and we may not be able to make many updates for a while, we will at least try to keep on top of things a bit more than we have.
Case in point: The Wongery World of the Week. Which, alas, seems to have stalled out after two weeks. We had more worlds lined up for that feature... we just, uh, apparently never got around to posting the relevant articles. That will change; we'll get the next World of the Week article up some time later today, and then put up two a week, one on Monday and one on Thursday, until we're caught up. (We'll backdate them to the days they were supposed to go up, because we can do that. This is not without precedent; the first World of the Week is dated January 7, but actually didn't go up till the 8th. Because of the way the World of the Week data is stored, that's easy to do. We won't backdate the posts in the corresponding forum, though; that may be possible, but it would be much trickier. Speaking of which, I see we never did make a forum post for the second World of the Week—whoops. We'll get on that later today too. [Actually, we ended up doing that before this forum post, because we forgot to post the news in the forum. Oops. Yes, we should automate that so a news post automatically gets posted to this forum; that's... one of many, many items on our to-do list.]) Admittedly, this may seem to have a slight disadvantage in that the next few Worlds of the Week are going to get reduced time on the front page, but since, as we've mentioned several times already, nobody is visiting the site, that doesn't seem to particularly matter much at this point.
We may as well address, for the benefit of those nonexistent readers for whom I am inexplicably writing this news post, exactly why the site went down. Apparently queries to the MySQL database powering the Central Wongery were causing a server overload, so the webhost blocked the databases until the issue was resolved. While they did send me a notification of the issue, Gmail unfortunately for some reason filtered it as spam, so I didn't see it. Blocking the database brought down not only the Central Wongery but most of the site as well, including the front page, because the other pages relied on those databases to parse Wiki syntax in news posts and to fetch and display the random article in the sidebar. (The Public Wongery and the forum remained accessible, but that wasn't of much use without the rest of the site.) In any case, to be honest I'm still not sure what was causing the problem. I think it may be that the overload was actually primarily caused by a different site I have hosted with the same account and that the Wongery's database just got tarred with the same brush. If that's the case, now that the issue with the other site has been resolved (at least for the moment), there should be no further problems with the Wongery. If that's not the case, though, then when the hosting company checks their statistics again tomorrow... the database may be blocked again, and the site will go back down. In that case, probably the only way I can get it back up will be to switch my shared hosting plan to a dedicated hosting plan. But I'm the one paying for the hosting, and I'm not likely to be able to afford such a switch for some time... not until mid-March at least. So... well, if the Wongery goes down again, that's likely to be why. But hopefully it won't come to that.
Regardless, we may have been away for a while, but we haven't given up on the Wongery. Other issues may have been getting in the way lately, but we do have big plans for this site. It's going to keep going, and it's going to grow. So keep checking back later. (Which it would make a lot more sense to say if anyone had, in fact, been checking on the site at all, but, eh, you get the idea. Whoever the "you" is that this post is addressed to.)