Our Adobe CS5 update arrived at the office today (we run their Design Premium suite), and we also got our copies of Microsoft Office 2010, Visual Studio 2010, and Expression 4 through Microsoft's Bizspark program.  On top of that, we have a new Intel X25-M SSD for our development server (to match the array of X25-E SSDs in the production server).

So if you don't hear from us for a couple of days, look for us under that big pile of install disks in the corner...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:16 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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In order to get Minx 1.2 out the door, we've bumped some planned features out to future 1.3 and 1.4 releases.  That still leaves a lot of goodness in each release, and we think you'll really like what we've cooked up for you.

We'll be doing a detailed rundown on all the new goodies in coming weeks, but here's a quick list of what we have planned for 2010:

Coming in 1.2

New tag support
New search & filter engine
New messaging & microblogging system
New data export system
New media player
New thumbnail and slideshow support
New site content and rating system
Improved editor - now supporting all major browsers
Improved spam filter

Coming in 1.3

New developer API
New standard feeds for comments and messages
New forum and wiki support
New easy file upload
New graphs and charts
New markup languages
Improved site statistics module
Improved site logging

Coming in 1.4

New help pages
New site maps
New scripting language
New podcasting and streaming support
New mail, news and chat integration
Improved search & filter engine
Improved developer API
Improved control panel

Coming in 1.5

New desktop client
New book
New application platform
New advertising module

We'll also be providing around 100 new themes with each new version.  These are just variations on the basic design, not completely new designs, but you can always use the theme builder - or even your own custom CSS - to design your site any way you want.

In addition to this, we'll be rolling out a series of sister sites, including mee.fm, our podcasting and streaming audio service, and mee.io, a handy file dropbox.  Look forward to seeing those in the second half of 2010!

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:38 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Our server lineup has changed quite a bit since my last update on this topic, so here's a little rundown on the machines that power mee.nu today.

The aircraft carrier of our fleet is Aoi.*  Aoi is a dual-processor hex-core hyperthreaded Xeon 5670, for a total of 12 CPUs and 24 hardware threads.  With 24GB of RAM, 3 x 2TB drives and 3 x 32GB Intel SSDs in RAID-5, Aoi runs eight specialised virtual machines handling various tasks for the mee.nu and mu.nu ecosystems, including the main blog hosting platform.

Our destroyer escort is provided by Midori and Momoko.  These are dual-core Xeon 3060 systems with 4GB of RAM and 500GB of disk each, and handle backup and website statistics.

Our newest server is Kurumi, a quad-core Xeon 3220 with 8GB of RAM and 1TB of disk.  Kurumi has a 1Gbit internet connection and 100TB of monthly bandwidth, and acts as a front-end cache for media files and other large downloads.  I'm not entirely sure what kind of ship that represents, though...

* All our servers are named after girls in anime series who are named for colours.  Aoi is blue, Midori is green, Momoko is momo-iro, peach-coloured, and Kurumi is brown.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:00 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Although things have been quiet for the last year or so, and we're yet to migrate some of the largest blogs we host over to Minx, we've still managed to rack up over 140 million page views and 50 million file downloads.

Sorry, I don't know how many uniques that is (though uniques will be counted in Minx 1.3).  Let's just say, lots.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:36 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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We'll be offline for about 20 minutes on Saturday morning (late Friday night for most parts of the US) to do some database maintenance in preparation for the rollout of Minx 1.2 - mostly adding new indexes.

Update: Maintenance completed successfully.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:41 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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Yes, it's been a long time since it's been updated.  mee.nu has been running all that time, of course, as well as our sister site mu.nu, and in fact we've upgraded to new servers (twice), but we've kind of been in stealth mode for a while.

We'll be surfacing very soon, and in fact we'll be taking a short outage next weekend in preparation for the rollout of the next version of Minx, our blogging* platform.

Stay tuned, we're back and we're going places.

* And, in the new version, forums, wikis, podcasts, and more.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:25 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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From all your friends at mee.nu.

You're looking pretty good for a 232-year-old.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:06 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Hi folks.

We apologise for the slow performance of the system over the last 24 hours or so.  A process that is importing new blogs into the system got a little carried away in its task, creating many, many duplicate records and gradually bringing the system to its knees.

The process has now been sacked, and normal service has been restored.*

We're working to clean up all the duplicate records - which only affect the blogs being imported, not any blogs you might have created yourselves - and once that is completed and the problem fixed, we will very cautiously restart the process.

* Albeit at great expense and with occasional llamas...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:50 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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We've re-organised our backups so that they no longer cause any interruption to server.  It was taking 30 seconds twice a day, but with all the new blogs joining us that was up to over a minute, so we've changed our backup strategy.

Still twice a day, but now you shouldn't even notice (unless you pay very close attention to the timing stats at the bottom of your blog page...)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:09 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Hi everyone.

We'll be doing some work on the system later today, loading up a whole lot of new blogs.

The service will be up and running throughout this process, but you may experience the occasional slowdown, where you'll need to wait a few seconds for something that's normally instantaneous.

We apologise for that, but I'm sure you'll be happy to be joined by all these new friends!

Update: We've postponed this for 12 hours to do a little more tweaking to the conversion process.  The title reflects the updated schedule.

Update: Running now!  The good news is that everything is running very smoothly so far.  The bad news is...  Actually, there's no bad news!  Well, I think I may have to do a little patching on one of the 250 blogs being imported (the theme didn't load properly) but that's all.  Looks like all that preparation is actually paying off!

Update: And - done!  There'll be a little cleanup work the next day or so, but it all went pretty well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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