The other day I wrote proudly that we had better more reliable server software in 2024 than we did the first time we bootstrapped blogging communities. #
We've been having serious problems on feedland.com since Friday when I made a software version mistake. At first it caused the server to crash when you tried to subscribe to a new feed, so you'd get an awful error message, either from the FeedLand website, or the browser, saying the server had gone away. I quickly fixed that problem and another, and restored the server to some basic functionality. But when I did some work on my account over the weekend, I saw that there were new errors. And then noticed that none of my feeds had updated since March 8, they still haven't. #
We're going to fix it this morning, by reverting the server software to the version as it was before the update, and the server should return to its previous reliability, Murphy-willing. Then we're going to upgrade the database, and then install the new software, and try again. That won't happen today and probably not tomorrow. #
Most people probably don't know that feedland.com is a project I'm doing with Automattic. It's running in their cloud. This system should be able to scale up in ways that a Digital Ocean droplet can't, where feedland.org and the new feedland.social are running. So when there are many thousands of users, we should be okay. That's why I did the work to convert FeedLand so everything is stored in the SQL database, and nothing in the file system, among other changes that had to be made last year, like getting off Twitter for identity. That was not much fun, but it had to be done. #
Anyway I am very sorry and embarrassed for the unreliable performance on our main server in the last few days. I can't promise it won't happen again, but we learned a lot in this experience, and in some cases re-learned. #
It's even worse than it appears and as they say -- still diggin! #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)