Site Maintenance

The site is undergoing a migration to a new server and will be in “read only” mode while the process is underway to ensure no data is lost. The site may at some point go down altogether as I use the opportunity to make some software upgrades. Thanks for your patience.

Update: OK, we’re back online… details after the jump for those interested.

I’ve moved the site to a dedicated server with lots more memory. This should result in better performance and reliability.

The transition resulted in the site being down longer than expected… sorry if you got some real work done as a result.

I also installed some minor software upgrades. Still no stable private messaging feature, unfortunately but I will keep checking.

Some of you have noted that I’d turned off the search feature. I did this because the native search was very resource intensive and was hurting site performance. Instead of turning that back on, I’ve integrated Google search so that the computational burden of searching is borne by Google instead of my server.

Google search is not as feature-ful as the native search, but I think the tradeoff is worthwhile because it results in faster site performance. (IE, aggregate time saved via faster page loads should more than offset any extra time spent because you can’t filter results by content type or category).

I think that covers it… many changes were made so it’s possible that something was broken. If you run into any difficulties, please do not post about it (because I don’t always read the forums) but rather email me at rich@piggington.com. Thanks!