The site will be undergoing some maintenance today, sometime around 11am EST. I will post a message here to give you all a 10 minute warning.

I expect the site to be unavailable for about a half hour.

Sandy

Preparation for the update is taking a lot longer than I expected. Pretty much everything about this update took a lot longer than I expected, so this is par for the course. Turns out there is over 1.2 gigs of attachments on this forum... which are really slowing down my backup-before-update procedure. It'll probably slow down my move-everything-around and reupload-everything procedures too. I'm going to try doing a bunch of that on the server to save a few hours of upload time.

It'll be about another hour or so before the site goes down.

Sandy

This is your 10 minute warning. The site will go wonky at about 1:45pm EST.

Sandy

The site is somewhat messed up in Chrome right now.

Also a little messed up in Firefox.

I'm scrambling to fix all the little unpredictables... give me a few minutes!

Sandy

for right now it is messed up but it will look REALLY nice
great job

The site looks like its gonna be great!

Is it acting up in Safari/IE too?

it's sill messed up

Looks awsome in firefox, but out of frame in chrome.
Very nice work though, im sure soon chrome will also be sorted.

not working in firefox 1.5...

Don't get used to this forum skin, it'll be gone as soon as I fix whatever is wrong with the new one.

So I've basically been sitting at this computer for over 30 hours straight now, and awake for about 45 straight. I need sleep and I actually want sleep, so I'll be going to sleep as soon as I complete this communication.

Part of the launch went well... the rest was a disaster. Something was causing the database engine to grind to a halt. My ever-suffering host responded by disabling my account. I THOUGHT I identified and fixed the problem, so I re-enabled the account. The database engine ground to a halt again. My host responded by suspending my account which took down the entire site (and e-mail, various other sites, and all kinds of other stuff). It took many hours of e-mails and international phone calls for us to understand each other's position well enough for him to feel comfortable in reactivating my account. (I may need to make the step to a dedicated virtual server, if only so I can happily crash it without affecting other shared hosting customers.)

I really need to learn this lesson before I learn it the hard way (that being the permanent cancellation of my hosting account). I don't know what I could have done better in this case, other than monitoring server resources as I released the new site and pulling the plug if/when I sensed something was off. I've tested this batch of updates about 10x more than any other code I've put up on this site, and I still haven't been able to reproduce the error in my offline environment. (Speaking of which, does anyone have any "server load" tools that I can use to simulate 50 or 100 users hitting a website at the same time?)

I have narrowed the error down to the forum style I created. I suspect it has something to do with the Community and Shop sidebars that I embedded in there via coding gymnastics. And rather than try and figure it out tonight, I'm going with this ugly style.

If you see any seemingly-flawed page designs (excluding the forum), let me know the URL, your browser details, and your operating system details. Include a screen shot if you can.

I'd love to start a dialogue on the awesome new Shop and my job application (neither of which I can link to due to another issue), but I'm too wiped.

Sandy

Let me staert out with a big THANK YOU!

The forum works fine for me for the most part, but every other page is skewed off to the side. I can simply scroll over though and then I can see everything.I'm using safari v4.0 and Mac OS X v10.5.7. Here's a couple screenshots.




I had a hard time posting this because of the lack of url usage now. Apparently we can't even edit old posts which have urls in them (yes, I tried). I submitted an error form thing and then I saw your other thread explaining the error.

In any case, once again, thank you very much for putting in all your time and effort to make this site the best it can be!

Don't know of any software but we could easily organise 100 or more of ourselves to be on the site at a particular UTC time to perform load test.

Thanks Danny, that's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for. My wife just happens to have a Mac, and I have seen the same problem happening there. Looks like an easy fix. Sometime later today.

Wayne, what I meant is that I need software to simulate various server loads in my development environment. On an average day, this site receives about 10 page requests per minute. Each page load translates into an average of 12 server file requests (forum template files, images, etc). I'd like a way of testing my code with about 5x that amount of traffic before I upload it. Maybe in this way I can avoid the kind of disaster that almost got my hosting account cancelled yesterday!

Sandy

I can't get the site to work at all in Google Chrome now. I just get:
"[an error occurred while processing this directive]

Sorry, but this area of the site is not for public use.

If this error seems out of place, please take a moment to notify me using the form below and I will do my best to get the error repaired. " and then the form to fill out to let you know about it.

Okay, so here I go again, tentatively stepping into uncertainty.

I think I know what was causing the server crashing problem: poor SQL scripts in the the new sideboxes. These have been optimized (along with bunches of other scripts on the site), but I'm going to leave them off until the forum has been running smoothly for at least a half a day. I'll be watching things closely today.

Some things to note:

• Safarii and some other browsers will still display this site poorly. I will look at fixing this later this evening.
• Signatures and images in messages will be required to fit into the new design without stretching the page or causing scrollbars to show up. Do what you can to fix yours, and in the meantime I'll do what I can to limit future unintentional infractions.
• If you find other problems not listed here, please post them.

Sandy

Sandy, we still can't post url links. Will this be fixed soon?

See the thread calle d"URL Posting Errors" in this forum. I'd post a link to it, but...!

Sandy

the site is still in the right side of the scren in firefox 1.5..

I am having the exact same problem as Danny Devitt

As you mentioned, things are still messed up in safari. But now the forum is skewed off too (it wasn't before). And the forum part of the page even has another scroll bar on it! So right now I've been doing a lot of scrolling. I can't wait till this is fixed.

Also, is the forum supposed to be this thin? I'll take a screen shot if you have no idea what I'm talking about.

I'm having some page rendering issues in IE8.

This one shows this thread running in compatibility mode; see the scroll bar? there's a horizontal one way at the bottom of the thread, too.
http://i499.photobucket.com/albums/rr35 ... tymode.png

IE8's rendering engine does a good job of getting rid of the issue.
http://i499.photobucket.com/albums/rr35 ... dering.png

...Except for when something stretches the page. I can't scroll over now.
http://i499.photobucket.com/albums/rr35 ... tretch.png

But I can scroll over in compatibility mode.
http://i499.photobucket.com/albums/rr35 ... bility.png

I'm noticing that this seems to be caused by the forum pages being loaded into iframes that are exactly as tall (vertically), pixel-wise, as the thread when rendered normally. They don't, however, seem to account for the width (horizontally) of normal rendering. I know that the current width limitation is probably caused by the sidebar-boxes you are planning (as I can see on all of the forum pages). In order to maintain compatibility, it may be necessary to compress the iframe to the exact vertical height of the browser window, and allow for scrollbars. It may also be necessary to widen the page layout for the forum pages.

The only other issue that I'm seeing with the site as a whole is that whenever I log into the collection manager, I get an HTTP 403: forbidden error, and I have to go and delete my twistypuzzles.com cookie in order to reset everything correctly.

It's looking great! I like the store interface, I love that the museum is accessible when I'm in the forum, and the frontpage is very inviting. I can't wait to see what else you have up your sleeves.

[edit] It's rendering a whole heck of a lot better now. Thanks for the quick fix.

[edit2]
I'm still having the 403:forbidden error. (I can send you the cookies if you like; I saved them out before fixing the issue this time).

I've also got some other rendering issues I didn't see before, and a new one (but it does not affect functionality).

Frontpage rendering issues in IE8's native rendering engine:
http://i499.photobucket.com/albums/rr35 ... ageIE8.png

Works A-OK in compatibility view.
http://i499.photobucket.com/albums/rr35 ... bility.png

Please respond to technical issues in this thread. There are too many of these "design feedback" threads around at the moment. On top of my e-mail and PMs, it's a little much to keep straight!


I had no idea so many people were using Chrome! I've got it installed now. This problem should now be fixed.


This one too. If not... what version of Firefox are we talking about?


Fixed.


That seems fully fixed now. The error form should be working now too, although I had to take off the handy document.referrer bit for some reason. (It might be related to the Apache security mod issue.)


Fixed.


Yep. Fixed.


Should be fixed in all browsers.


Each of issues should be fixed now.


Should be fixed now.


Yeesh. Ugly. Since everything resolves in 403 Forbidden, this error must be related to this issue. I've sent it to my host.
Thanks for finding that!


I believe that is fixed. Please check it again. It used to happened once in maybe 15 or 20 refreshes in Firefox 3. It doesn't seem to anymore. I don't konw if it's possible to have IE7 and IE8 installed on the same computer at the same time...

Sandy