Welcome to MozillaZine's New Server!Monday July 21st, 2003MozillaZine has moved to a new server! Due to the increasing popularity of the site, we've moved from American Data Technology, Inc., our service provider for the last five years, to a dedicated box hosted by Rackshack. Geographically, that's a move from North Carolina to Texas. With a new dedicated server, MozillaZine should have far fewer outages and SQL errors, as well as room for future growth. The new server has a 2GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor, 512MB RAM, an 80GB hard drive (running at 7,200RPM) and Red Hat Linux 7.3. We hear it plays a mean game of Quake III Arena. On the software side, we're using a similar set up to before, with Apache, PHP and MySQL. You can see the server at Rackshack's webcam page; just don't ask us which one it is. Two of the most popular sections of the site — the forums (forums.mozillazine.org) and the weblogs (weblogs.mozillazine.org) — moved to the new server (and their own subdomains) a few weeks ago, so we are fairly confident that there should be no major problems now that the rest of the site is here. However, there may still be some teething troubles (we're aware of some minor issues already) so please bear with us and let us know if you come across anything major. We've also taken the opportunity to improve our Talkback pages, which allow you to respond to each article. Comments are now displayed in a nested format, with all the responses on a single page but still ordered by subject. We believe this new format is superior to both the previous threaded mode and the alternative flat mode, which we silently removed a few weeks ago hoping nobody would notice (we were wrong). The older display formats have now been retired. Regular visitors will also be relieved to find that the link detection algorithm (which pulls URLs out of comments and turns them into links) has been vastly improved. Bugzilla bug number references (such as bug 12345) should also now be automagically linkified. In addition, our polls have returned; we'll keep the current poll up for a few more days to allow you a little more time to vote before announcing the results. Countless improvements have been made to the rest of the site as well. We're aiming for a greater degree of standards-compliance and many pages are now valid HTML 4.01 Strict. If everything looks funny, you've probably got old copies of our stylesheets cached: Shift+Reload to make it all better again. We'd like say a big thank you to James "Imajes" Cox, who gave us masses of assistance with the server move. We're also deeply grateful to everyone who gave us offers of hosting or recommendations of hosting companies. Finally, thanks to all our readers for supporting us over the years. MozillaZine could not remain at the heart of the Mozilla community without you. It's too bad that flat mode is gone. I find it is too much of a hassle to click on each thread to see if the responses are worth reading. Also, in terms of bandwidth consumption, doesn't it take more bandwidth to load each thread as one clicks through the messages? Flat mode is gone, but it's not replaced by the old threaded mode. Nested mode is like a cross between threaded and flat, in that it shows threading but all on one page. I like this new mode. how come talkback doesn't use the forums? ie. when a message is posted to the main mz page, a topic is created automatically in the forums. however i also like the new look :) Theynever did as long as I've been here. The question wasn't "why don't they anymore?", the question was "why don't they?" It's a good idea, and I agree that having talkback and forums as similar animals but totally unconnected is kinda weird. Noobs probably think "I have to sign up for mozillazine accounts twice?" I know I did. Thank you thank you thank you for nested mode. I've been hoping for it for ages. It's fantastic, and makes the site much more usable! The talkback is a lot better. It was literally one of the first pieces of PHP code that I created, and I'm glad that someone went over it and dealt with my horrible link parsing. I'm still trying to figure out why my first page served from the new server seems to take at least 20 seconds (or, technically, 20x longer). After that first page lag, all subsequent pages seem speedy. Now that the main website is on the new server, I've noticed the same problem on it, too. Any possible clue as to why this could be happening? Is anyone else experiencing this? "I'm still trying to figure out why my first page served from the new server seems to take at least 20 seconds (or, technically, 20x longer). After that first page lag, all subsequent pages seem speedy. Now that the main website is on the new server, I've noticed the same problem on it, too. Any possible clue as to why this could be happening?" I had this problem once. I think it's the server trying to reverse-lookup the IP for every request it gets. Sometimes apache does this, even if it doesn't need to do it for logging. Check your error logs (or maybe the syslogs) for "gethostbyaddr" errors. Sorry I can't be more help for the fix; it's been a long time since I've had this problem. I had the first page load very slowly and the CSS go all strange but ever since all the pages have been much faster. I like this new look - will subsequent replies just stay with the same indent or will it go further and further to the right if you get what I mean? I hope that's not one of those IDE drives with just a year warranty. How come not two hard drives running RAID 1, or a combination of RAID 1 for /boot (/ ?) and RAID 5 for the rest? Having nested posts will probably mean that articles w/ tons of responses, such as http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=3422 , will probably take forever to load for some people. Another thing: the responses counts in the Older News section of the front page are broken. I'm curious why MozillaZine doesn't use Moveable Type for its stories. It would really be neat to see the Talkback links to the stories and build an even bigger sense of community. this new look is very strange, the font is smaller in some posts (replies?) also the front page looks crazy. Did you try forcing the broswer to not look at the cache (shift + Reload). That should force the browser to get the new stylesheet. Good work on everything, thanks. :) But what's with this very old Mosaic poll on the front page? And the "older News" column doesn't display the number of comments. I chat with imajes just about every day... And I had no idea. heh. I like the newer look. It doesnt sound much better than an ordinary Desktop, and why didnt you get one with an Athlon :D Too bad that it doesn't work at all with Netscape 4.x. I don't mind having a bad layout as long as it's still readable. Right now it isn't. (Still waiting for the "Update Bookmark" feature before I can fully switch to Mozilla/Firebird) I like the new Talkback format a lot, good job :) I do have one gripe though...the top of the main page, with the blimp and mozillazine logo is mostly a giant blank space. Why so much whitespace? It takes up nearly a quarter of the screen at my resolution (1024x768). Maybe put them both on one line? Or make it look like the header of this page, it looks fine. Otherwise, good work! "I do have one gripe though...the top of the main page, with the blimp and mozillazine logo is mostly a giant blank space." Shift+Reload. You'll get the new stuff (no space hopefully). We suck because I don't think the modified attributes of the files have been updated so your browser will use the cached copy. Alex Don't forget to update the code for the poll talkbacks. They still use threaded mode, and. Another thing about the poll talkbacks: there's a blank line above and below the header of each post there. (And, yes, I did Shift+Reload, several times.) - MXN "Don't forget to update the code for the poll talkbacks." We didn't forget. :-) It'll be done soon. "Another thing about the poll talkbacks: there's a blank line above and below the header of each post there. (And, yes, I did Shift+Reload, several times.)" That's a consequence of the new CSS. Will be fixed when the poll results pages are updated to the new style. Alex |