Apologies again.

A massive spam wave emanating from China took out our sister server, and gave mee.nu the DNS wobblies as well.  We'll be re-arranging our DNS this weekend - look for a notice on that.  There may be a little downtime while that happens, but that will be better than the major downtime we get currently when something bad happens.

Update: We've completed the reconfiguration of our DNS servers, and we're just awaiting the update of the root servers.  Once this is completed, mee.nu should be isolated from outside server failures - unless the .nu domain itself goes flaky again, which has only happened once since 1997.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:48 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Sorry about any downtime you might have experience over the past few hours.  We lost a drive in our secondary server, which caused intermittent DNS problems, which meant you couldn't reach mee.nu at times even though the main server was up and running just fine.

Though it's a freak occurrence that two entirely different problems both affected our DNS, we will be changing our DNS configuration to prevent this sort of thing in the future.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:51 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Hi everyone.

We're having some DNS issues right now.  The DNS delegation for the whole mee.nu domain was accidentally deleted by the domain registry, and due to the way DNS works, it's going to take a few hours before it's fully working again. 

Right now. the main mee.nu site seems to be working, but indivudual blogs may or may not work.  This should gradually fix itself over the next few hours as records are updated.

If you continue to experience problems, email me at help@mu.nu (normally it would be help@mee.nu, but that might not work right now) and I'll look into it further.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:43 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Sorry about the outage just now, and the couple of database hiccups we've had in the past week (which you may not have noticed, as I was able to fix things pretty quickly).

I thought we had a hardware problem with the new server, but it turns out instead to be a software problem - a bug is causing one of the applications on the server to use up all the memory.  All of it, including memory that other applications would like to use.  When that happens, Minx and/or MySQL can get shut down without warning.

I should have this fixed very soon.  In the meantime, now that I know what the problem is, the worst case will be a few minutes to reboot the server and check the database and we'll be up and running again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:07 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Merry Christmas!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:13 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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We had a hiccup with the session management system, and it looks like it was dropping people's logins, so that you would see messages such as You are not authorised to access this page.  when a moment ago everthing was working fine.

A quick restart seems to have fixed the problem, but we're still checking to see what caused it in the first place.  If it happens to you, leave a comment here - you can still comment even if you can't log in - and we'll make sure it's fixed as soon as humany possible.

Update: Still happening, still working on it.

Update: I've temporarily disabled the code that cleans up expired sessions.  Let's see if that does the trick.

Update: It seems to be fixed now.  If you do still have problems, you can leave a comment here or email help@mee.nu, and I'll take another look at it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:04 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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There's a new BBCode tag in town - two tags, in fact - and the name of the game is slideshows.

[slideshow {group=groupid} {size=expression|resize=expression} {title=text} {alt=text}]
[slide=path {group=groupid} {size=expression|resize=expression} {title=text} {alt=text}]

The [slide] tag works very much like the [img] tag.  The difference is that instead of simply embedding an image in your page, it creates a thumbnail for the image and a link that will bring up the full-size image as part of a slideshow.  (You'll need to update your blog to 1.1 to get the full effect, but the thumbnail and link will work on older sites.)

The [slideshow] tag lets you set up the default values for a slideshow.  The group can be used if you want to have two separate slideshows in a post; simple give them different ID's.  The size or resize value can be used to automatically make all your thumbnails the same size, sparing you from specifying this each time.

more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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A couple of users have alerted me to the fact that the Style Images editor doesn't work quite as it should under Internet Explorer, with differing problems arising depending on whether you're using IE6 or IE7.

I'll be doing additional testing and fixing those problems very soon.  In the meantime, if you need to create Style Images, I highly recommend the Firefox browser.

A Note On Browser Support

Minx (the blogging application that runs mee.nu) is developed against Firefox and then tested under Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari.  Usually you only need to make sure that pages render correctly; however, active user interface pages require more testing and problems can slip through.

We intend to fully support all four major browsers on all platforms.  Currently, there are major issues with the WYSIWYG editor on both Opera and Safari; we will shortly be adding an alternative editor that supports all four browsers.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:03 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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Minx doesn't email you when new comments or private messages arrive.  It could - it would be easy to do - but I don't want to be sending out thousands (and eventually millions) of emails a day.  There are all sorts of problems with being a high-volume email source, and I'd rather simply not go there.

But it's very useful to be alerted to incoming comments (and private messages!) without having to visit your site every ten minutes.  So how else can this be achieved?

Well, there's RSS.  Minx already supports automatic RSS 2.0 and Atom feeds (and you can customise it to support other formats).  Why not add an RSS feed of comments?

Comments are public, so an RSS feed of them isn't an issue.  (Not true of private messages, but we'll get to that.)  But maybe you don't want everyone to see spam or unapproved comments.  Well, you can set up a hidden feed.  Or the system can do that automatically for you.  If your public comment feed is at http://mysite.mee.nu/feed/comments, and your private comment feed is at, say, http://mysite.mee.nu/feed/comments/aj69c0, you'd have to try an average of a billion combinations before getting access to someone's private comment feed. 

There would be a link in the editing interface so you could subscribe with one click, and easy-peasy, comment notification.

I could certainly do the same with private messages.  If you're sensitive about those and worried about that 1 in a billion chance, I can have an option where the RSS feed only shows the arrival of a new message, and not the sender or contents.

I could also do secured feeds, but that's more fiddly and many popular readers don't support them.

So, what do you think?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:50 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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So, you may have noticed that we have these wonderful new banners and layouts and stuff.  And you may be asking how do you use this?

Here's how!

Converting to 1.1

If you have an original style blog - if your banner doesn't look something like the above - the first thing you'll need to do is update your site to 1.1. 

This is very easy to do.  In your edit menu, got to Styles.  You will see an option Choose a theme... Update to 1.1.  All the themes are similar, varying only in the banner image and some colours.  You can see the basic images used to produce the banners here.  If you want to customise your starter banner, you can grab the images from that page.



Click the button, and your blog will be transformed!

(Note: You may need to do a forced reload of your site to pick up changes immediately when you are working with styles.  In most browsers, you can do this by holding down the shift key and clicking the reload (refresh) button.)


more...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:31 AM | Comments (15) | Add Comment
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