About the Downtime

As many of you know, the site recently vanished for a few weeks. Due to the amount of mail I got about this, I figured I'd explain what happened, and why, as well as some other things that are in the works.

For starters, the recent downtime was due to the fact that I left BSDi, as well as California, to take a job at O|S|D|N, here in Massachusetts. The box the site was on used to live at the offices of the Open Source Division of BSDi, since that was where I worked. When I left, the box went with me. Since I drove out here, the box spent a while, unplugged, in the back of my car. So that's the reason for the recent downtime.

While I'm on the subject of the machine, I might as well give its specs. It's a Celeron 500 with 64MB of RAM, and a 10GB hard drive. It handles the current site load just fine, which means we need to get more people reading the site :-)

I would like to put another 64MB of RAM in it, so if you have any to donate, let us know.

In the Works...

As usual, we're always trying to come up with new ideas for the site. Additional "boxes", article ideas, whatever -- anything that'll make the site better and/or easier to use. Joel is still busily working on the phpZine backend, and hopefully we'll have the new code up and running soon. In the meantime, one of the first things on my list is to start putting the articles into a database and sucking them out from there. Since databases and myself don't get along all that well, it should be fun :-)

Another thing that's being worked on is a replacement for the news scripts we're using. Right now, we're using some perl scripts, but it will be moving to PHP, hopefully within the next week. Larry Sica <[email protected]> is currently working on that.

We're also looking for ideas for polls, etc., for the site. If you have any ideas, we'd like to hear from you, so send us some mail, ok?

That's about all for this month. I was going to run this article through jive before publishing it, but then I'd need to have a non-jived version for those of you who don't speak jive. What it is, mama! ;-)

Later,

- jim

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