Unplanned downtime

Blogs, together with all other IT systems in the university, have been unavailable for much of today. Early this morning there was a fire in an electricity sub-station in Earlsdon. This caused a high voltage switch on the University's inner power loop to blow, which took out power to some buildings on campus including the main ITS machine room.

When the power was switched back on it blew an electrical circuit board in the ITS machine room. Electricians worked throughout today to replace this component and power has now been restored to the room.

So far the campus network, internet connection, web services (SiteBuilder, Blogs, Forums, etc.) and most of the core components that allow customers to log on to their workstations have been restored. The SquirrelMail email service for students has also been restored.

The GroupWise email service remains unavailable as is the ResNet service and the FARGO data server. Work will continue on restoring these and other systems throughout the weekend.

John Dale : 17 Mar 2006 18:55 |  Tags: ITS |  Comments (65) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

14th March downtime

We are upgrading to the latest greatest version of the Oracle database where all of the Warwick Blogs data lives on Tuesday 14th March between 09:30 and 11:30. This will mean that Warwick Blogs will be unavailble between those times.

: 09 Mar 2006 09:54 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Maintenance |  Comments (7) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Trackbacks and Galleries

Released a small (functionality wise) update to BlogBuilder today, with some pretty big code changes, so if you see any problems it would be very helpful if you could comment and tell us what they are – there shouldn't be any problems but, as with any change, it's difficult to be 100% certain.

• When you trackback a non-Warwick Blog that supports trackbacks, it should now correctly show the URL of your entry to that blog.
• There should now be no problems with turning off trackbacks or pings for individual entries.
• The bug that caused the trackback counter to increment when a post that was trackbacking it was edited has been fixed.
• The My Comments screen now shows "Today" and "Yesterday" where relevant just like entries do (and we're working on the other problems with the My Comments page ordering wrongly and not updating fast enough).
• Galleries now have a maximum description length of 4,000 characters, and tell you much more politely if you exceed it.

For those who care: This update has taken a long time because there's also a backend upgrade where the code now uses the new features (foreach loops, autoboxing, Generics) in Java 5, which makes the code a lot nicer and safer to work with, and removes 2,286 iterators in the BlogBuilder code and replaces them with foreach loops (in almost every case)!

Mathew Mannion : 02 Mar 2006 18:43 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Galleries Trackbacks Update |  Comments (15) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Image improvements

Small update to BlogBuilder today:

• Uploading zip files with images in should be considerably faster now
• We now resize images down to a max of 1280px height and width when they are uploaded
• We are now using a higher quality image algorithm so there should be less resizing artifacts from now on. This will slightly improve images already uploaded because it uses a better rendering algorithm, but the biggest improvement will be seen in freshly uploaded images as they will get saved at a better quality and larger size

If anyone has any feedback, please comment here as we'd like to hear if this does indeed improve matters.

: 28 Feb 2006 17:15 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Images Update |  Comments (6) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Performance issues

It's not been a fun day today. Partly related to the massive code changes we've made to blogs recently, we've had some nasty performance problems today.

Hopefully the bugs with the release and the performance issues are now resolved. Unfortunately my task today was made harder by some very bad timing. At around the same time, we had 4 search engines indexing blogs and a huge number of images requests coming from external sites. This made diagnosing the performance problems all the more difficult. As a temporary measure, I've had to block the search engine crawlers and requests for our images that are from non-Warwick pages.

What this means is that until we lift this restriction (which will hopefully be very soon), you won't be able to see images from your galleries embedded in non-Warwick pages and our latest content won't show up in the search engines quite so quickly.

To give an idea of the size of this problem, here are some stats:

• 160,000 requests for user uploaded images a day
• Only 6% are requested from on campus!
• Only 60% of images are embedded in Warwick pages, the other 40% are linked to from other websites
• Our top external referrers are myspace.com and Google images
• Top 5 image searches in the first few days of Feb: kate beckinsale, arctic monkeys, evolution motorcycle trousers,hell, mafia
• 30% of all images requets are for images from just 10 blogs
• The top 2 individual images alone count for 7% of all image hits (we have almost 80,000 images)
• In the first week or so of Feb we served out 1.3m images which is 33GB of data

Now then, as you can imagine, that's a fair few hits. The problem I have with it is that the performance for our staff and students is degraded because of a massive number of external requests. I like the fact that Warwick Blogs rates highly in Google…but with that ranking comes a lot of unwanted traffic.

Obviously we'll try and resolve the performance issues and try and allow these requests to start flowing again. The problem is that we are not just serving images statically as we are doing single sign-on checks and permission checking and resizing of images on the fly. These are all problems that can be fixed and optimised, but it just goes to show that with systems like this, you never can tell where the bottlenecks will be until you hit them.

: 09 Feb 2006 23:23 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Performance |  Comments (12) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BlogBuilder update

We did a deploy of BlogBuilder today that has changed a lot of backend code. It is unlikely that you'll notice any change (except hopefully a performance improvement), but if you do notice any problems please let us know by commenting here. These changes were very wide ranging and there could well be unexpected behaviour hiding away somewhere.

: 08 Feb 2006 15:28 |  Tags: BlogBuilder |  Comments (5) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

BB improvements

A new version of Blogbuilder was released this afternoon with a few improvements that hopefully everyone will like…

• As you may have noticed, the home page now displays one of 9 random styles when you go to it (designed by Hannah)
• The auto-tagging feature has been improved to be more specific about which entries it tags, and you can now delete or edit auto-tags on entries. If you have an entry that was accidentally tagged twice, you can now delete one (or both) of them – and this won't happen in future.
• External trackbacks now work again
• There's been a few more improvements to the "insert an image" popup dialog on the create an entry page
• The latest discussions algorithm has been improved to hopefully keep the front page updating more often with new topics – thanks to Colin for some help with the equations involved

Any feedback or comments are always welcome

Mathew Mannion : 02 Feb 2006 17:19 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Tags Update |  Comments (27) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Blogbuilder Update

Blogbuilder was updated this afternoon with a few nice new things that people may have noticed:

Galleries

• Galleries have been made slightly prettier
• In JavaScript enabled browsers, clicking on an image now brings it up on an overlay on the screen, to allow for a better experience. The icons on the image (for logged in users) allow for modification of the image as before
• You can now sort galleries by date

Other

• The "insert an image" popup when creating an entry has been improved so that thumbnailed images act the same way as gallery images
• If you write entries about certain topics, it may be auto tagged.
• At the bottom of entries and comments, if they were posted today or yesterday, they say "Today" or "Yesterday" as opposed to the date

Comments and problems to the usual place, as always.

Mathew Mannion : 26 Jan 2006 18:02 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (22) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Criticism vs abuse

There have been several entries in the last few days as a result of the on-going problems with passwords and suspended accounts. People are understandably annoyed about the difficulties that this has caused them, and in some cases have used their blog to express their annoyance and to criticise IT Services about the way this situation has been handled. That's absolutely fine; there's no problem with using your blog to write about the university, and well-reasoned criticism is a good and useful thing.

But there is a difference between criticism and abuse; on Warwick Blogs, criticism is fine but abuse is not acceptable. If your post includes words such as "retarded" or "lunatics" then you haven't understood the difference. If you're going to write (or you already have written) on this subject please look at your text and consider whether it reads as criticism or as abuse, and if the latter, please consider editing it.

John Dale : 24 Jan 2006 09:30 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Blogbuilder Update

There has been a small update to Blogbuilder this morning that sees some slight changes and improvements, as below:

• The "Insert an image" popup when you click the link next to the box on the create an entry screen has been revamped to make it easier and less complicated
• The "latest discussions" list now has the number of different contributors to the discussion on the tooltip. You can also see this for comments on all entries now (just the number of different logged in users)
• We are working on tweaking the topics that reach "People are currently discussing…" in order to make it so that the list updates more frequently and more new entries appear on there
• You can now see the IP address of comments on entries on your blog
• There has been a lot of help added for gallery and image tasks

If you have any comments, please post them below.

Mathew Mannion : 19 Jan 2006 10:37 |  Tags: BlogBuilder Update |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem