| A new milestone (and some updates) | by marasmus |
| Yesterday we crossed 500 users! It's good to know that people keep liking what we have to offer. We're working on offering more!
Those of you who bother to log in to the main page might have noticed that website statistics and your website bandwidth usage are both accessible from the left menu. We'll keep doing the stats this way and will stop updating the stats.html file in everyone's public_html directory. We're going to move users' websites (that are not on subdomains) to users.vectorstar.net/~username/ soon. We will also be setting up a permanent auto-forward so that any requests to www.vectorstar.net/~username/ go to the right server. Why?!? Because we want to separate our main (and now complicated) website environment from the users' sites. It allows us to change and try things on our system without affecting your websites. :) Better stability for you! This stuff (and a lot more) fits into a new overall server structure we're implementing here. Our #1 problem at VectorStar has been that our file server has been a singular point of failure, and when it fails, there has been no automated way to recover. In fact, the servers lock up so hard we have to physically reset them! This new design completely resolves that problem by using a completely different filesystem technology that lets use have redundant and resilient copies of our main data on multiple servers. We'll be eliminating the need for ole' Vector (which parts-wise was half-apathy and half-chester #1) entirely... at least for now. If we grow too quickly we might end up needing another server! :) I've also been working on revamping the feature configurations in our system... Sometime this week you'll see a new Account Features page and hopefully new Pending Tasks and Messages pages as well. It's really just a lot of backend work so we can offer you more services. | |
| Re: A new milestone (and some updates) | by vahman |
| Users will continue to pour in I am sure as this is one of very few no BS sites where you can get some webspace and mail. Good to see Laird has a focus on getting the file server squared away, as we all hate single points of failure (I am sure Laird hates them more than the average person). Now, I still need to learn this perl thing. | |
| Re: A new milestone (and some updates) | by darklighter |
| Looks very promising guys and gals, I'll be "playing" with it tonight :) I'll introduce myself in the message board section since this looks like mostly news sections. Good job and thanks for accepting me.
-Colby aka Darklighter | |
| Re: A new milestone (and some updates) | by nuzod |
| Keepin' it real. How about some milestone t-shirts? I'll get that project going for you. | |
| Re: A new milestone (and some updates) | by marasmus |
| oh snap! Yeah, we really do need to do some t-shirts or something. One year for christmas I had these bad-ass bowling shirts made for all the staff... expensive as hell, though. I'm sure we can come up with some shirt designs that people will like. | |
| Re: A new milestone (and some updates) | by nuzod |
| You know I'll buy whatever you come up with, dude. What kind of theme(s) were you going for? | |
| Re: A new milestone (and some updates) | by darklighter |
| how are the shirts coming? | |
| Re: A new milestone (and some updates) | by marasmus |
| We've been talking about shirts for almost 3 years... Some designs have been drawn up, but nothing has really been good enough for us to go forward with making them. We've also thought about making some shirts that have nothing to do with VectorStar at all, just funny/cynical/sarcastic stuff. If someone comes along with a shirt design that really knocks our socks off, we'll probably move ahead with getting them printed up. | |
| Re: A new milestone (and some updates) | by darklighter |
| How about having a contest on here? provide an area for us to post possible designs. Have like different categories. All designs have to be custom of course, no copyrighted images etc. what ya think? then vote on like top 3 or something. winner gets a shirt if it goes through? just some ideas. Get some people more involved here. Some Questions:
What theme? What is VectorStar's Logo? What color? How Big? And what ever else you can come up with. | |
| Re: A new milestone (and some updates) | by marasmus |
| Our logo is in the top-left corner. It's generated from Verdana bold/italic with a color gradient. It's pretty easy to duplicate. I'll start a thread in the Message Board for the contest, and include some more detailed information and some sample files. | |
| Re: A new milestone (and some updates) | by darklighter |
| Anything new? have not heard much new news. | |