Clearskys.net Blog

Documentation and Forum sites down

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Hi all

This is just a short note to say that the Documentation and Support forum sites are currently not very stable.

This is due to Media Temple having an increasing number of problems with their Grid server, which still hosts those sites.

Luckily, I had already moved this blog to our new Slicehost server. As soon as I can regain consistent access to the old server it looks like I will have to bring forward the transfer. There goes my weekend…..

If you can read this…

I have just moved this blog across to our new server, if you are reading this message then your DNS has updated correctly and you are looking at the new site.

At the moment I haven’t transfered everything across so I will be spending the next few days going though all of the posts and pages and tracking down what is missing or not working. At the moment NONE of the sample clearskys.net plugins are installed and active but I will get around to bringing them across.

Thank you for your patience.

Amazon establish Service Health Dashboard

Are you tired of wondering if it’s your system or code that is causing a problem, or if the service you are using is the reason for all your errors?

Amazon yesterday announced the availability of their new Service Health Dashboard.

Customers have told us that having such a status indicator would be more useful than visiting a service-specific forum to see if messages have been posted about an issue with a service. As soon as we know about a change in the status of a service, we’ll change the color as appropriate on this page. It is intended as the single, authoritative source of information on the status of our services, eliminating doubt as to when and where to check.

It looks very thorough, displaying not only the current status but also a historical record. It even has RSS feeds for each of the Amazon services. I recommend bookmarking the page and keeping it handy if you are a serious Amazon AWS user.

Server moves, testing and updates

This blog post is, in all honesty, a way of testing the blogging bundle in TextMate. Yes I have succumbed… I’m only 14 days into the 30 day trial period but it certainly looks like I will be putting my hand in my pocket and buying a license.

After months (over a year actually) of being reliant on Eclipse PHP I pretty much thought that my process of development was as streamlined as it could get. Boy was I wrong!! I highly recommend trying it out (Mac owners only though I’m afraid).

Server Moves

We’ve been hosted on the MediaTemple Grid-Server now for almost a year, and whilst it has been mostly fine and certainly better than our previous hosts, the extra level of control and ssh access has spoilt me a bit. I was planning on upgrading to a MediaTemple DPV server until I found Slicehost.

I’ve been playing with a basic Slicehost slice for a few weeks now and have managed to get WordPress MU running on it with the Nginx webserver and PHP5 running as a FastCGI process. I may write up a tutorial at a later date, but all I can say for now is Wow, does that thing fly. It certainly shows up the availability and latency problems MediaTemple have been having over the past 4 months.

I will be posting as parts of the site make the move over to the new server, so if some things stop working, then you know why.

Development Updates

I must admit to being rather inspired by the recent release of the new BuddyPress website and WordPress MU plugins. So I am contemplating taking the Property management plugins in a similar direction (though obviously not by getting a job at Automattic).

The main Property management plugin is very close to approaching an Alpha release. It is primarily a backend administration plugin that has no interaction with the public side of the WordPress powered site. The front-end plugins will use the information generated by the management plugin to display the required information to your site visitors, these will be released a bit later.

I have the Property management plugin currently in use and undergoing testing on one WordPress MU powered site and so far it seems to be behaving itself, there are a few bugs I am working through (and browser issues - yes I am looking at you Internet Explorer) but nothing major.

I will post more on this early next week, and maybe include a screencast of some of the functionality, if I can manage to operate a computer after my planned birthday weekend Irish pub crawl.

Wow, how things change when you’re not looking

Well, my plan to write a post at least twice a week didn’t last very long. Nor did my promise to get WordPress MU compatible versions of my plugins available for download. And what’s more… this blog is still running on the standard WordPress install rather than WordPress MU.

My excuse… I have spent the past two weeks in meetings and discussions with a number of people, who shall remain nameless for the time-being, regarding the way forward for both myself and the software.

Needless to say, I am quite excited at the moment about the future direction, but unfortunately that is all I can say for now. Let me just say that it is good news and, hopefully, will mean a new lease of life for all concerned (you guys included).

Advertising for charity

For the next few months (until at least July anyway) I am going to try introducing a few advertising slots (125×125 boxes and/or text links) over on the top right hand side of the site (just under the Search box).

If anyone is interested in trying one out then the price will be a minimum payment of $50 for a month (you can pay any amount above this if you want) and all money will go direct to Oxfam and the Gurkha Welfare Trust.

Please feel free to contact me if you would like any more details.

Support is back online

I’ve finally got around to catching up on all the posts on the Support forum, so if anyone posted without a response there will either be an answer waiting for you or a request for more information.

Can I also kindly request that any errors or bugs you find in our software is reported directly into the Forum rather than as a comment on this blog. This will hopefully make the finding and direct answering of problems easier. You can also request an email update when an answer is made to your discussion by clicking on the “Subscribe to Discussion” link on the right hand side of the forum.

Back to the grind stone - a status update

Well, I’ve been away from the computer for a short while now (at least two months) and it has been fantastic and very much needed. The break has given me the chance to actually sit and make plans for 2008 and onwards rather than just responding to events as they happen. The only problem being my extreme optimism (I should register that as a new extreme sport) in what one person can achieve in a given time (and to handicap things further, what I can achieve in a given time).

On that note, I have a number of challenges which I will detail as they progress to their starting point, which I hope you will all appreciate and maybe even find it in your hearts to help or promote on your own sites. Could I be anymore secretive? Well yes, but you’ll understand later why I don’t want to announce these things without having the proper structure in place to handle things beforehand.

Short term updates

WordPress MU
In the next few days I shall be moving this blog (and a number of the other blogs that are on this server) across to WordPress MU.
Why? Well I originally moved from MU to standard WordPress over a year ago as I didn’t have enough blogs hosted to warrant the complexity of running a pre-release version of MU. I now have a much larger collection of blogs and sites running on WordPress and am actually starting to dread the thought of upgrading them all (even using svn). So as they have to be upgraded anyway, I thought that a single upgrade to MU should make my future life a lot easier, and mean I can add new blogs very quickly.

Update of plugins
I am aware that a number of my plugins currently don’t play nicely with WordPress MU or multiple user systems. These will obviously all have to be fixed as I need to use them on my own sites, so expect new releases of most plugins quite soon.

Plugin Factory
Going back to my earlier mention of promoting things without having the necessary structure in place first, the Plugin Factory, unfortunately, suffered because of this. From the moment I mentioned it on this blog my other workload increased overnight and I couldn’t find the time to devote to making the Plugin Factory a success. To those who have sent plugin requests, I apologise if you haven’t had a reply or we lost contact. I have a list of the requests that I will start to make my way through. If you submitted a request and never got a response then please submit again to show you are still interested.

Charity Work
More on this a little later, though I suspect that this will be taking up a large amount of my time in 2008 thanks mainly to the Extreme Optimism I mentioned earlier, my large mouth and an even larger amount of alcohol consumed one night over the christmas period.

Finally my thanks for everyone for their patience whilst I was away and a belated Happy New Year to all of you.

Rgds
Barry

What platform do you use?

This is probably not the place to ask this question, as most people who arrive at this site will be searching for WordPress plugins.

What platform do you use for you rental property site?

• WordPress
• MODx
• CodeIgniter PHP
• Custom written in PHP
• ASP (or other Microsoft technology)
• Joomla
• Other…

My reasons for asking will (hopefully) become clearer early in the new year, but any information that you can provide on the technology you use (and if possible, why you chose it) will be extremely useful.

Take the strain - welcome Sean

Hello all

Due to the ever excessive workload of our master and chief (a lot of it self inflicted), I have (been) volunteered to help keep this blog and the support forum up and running.

We have a large collection of draft posts to get tidied up and posted, which should see us all through to the new year and who knows, maybe even a software release or six?

So hopefully you will be seeing and hearing a lot from me over the coming months.

Best regards
Sean

ps. Only 2.5 shopping weeks left till Christmas - sorry couldn’t resist