Problems fixed for V2 users, solutions for older admin.weblogs.us blogs

NOTE: for everybody that logs into their blog at v2.weblogs.us, all problems should be gone. For people that login at admin.weblogs.us, we either need to upgrade you to V2 or if you’d rather move to a different host, the export feature still works on admin.weblogs.us

Hey guys, sorry for the poor communication lately, here is an update of what’s been going on:

Information about the recent problems with Weblogs.us

July 12th
As I left Missouri for vacation the weblogs.us server ran out of hard drive space, server was shut down.

July 14th
I discovered the problem and upon arriving in Colorado I emailed TulasConnect (with whom I collocate the server) and asked them to reset the server, it took a couple tries but service was restored on the 17th.

July 22nd
MySQL became overloaded on the server, prevented commenting and posting. Fixed on the 23rd

Earlier in the month I tried using SCODE to prevent comment spam, this was blocking many legitimate comments. This problem has been fixed for V2 users.

Issue still remaining

The blogs hosted on admin.weblogs.us are unable to post new entries. This problem is related to the Berkley DB system that admin.weblogs.us uses.

The solution for is to transfer the blogs to v2.weblogs.us which is faster, easier to support and overall just better than the old system. Thankfully, admin.weblogs.us blogs are still able to export all their entries and comments to the standard Movable Type export format.

If you have an admin.weblogs.us site and would like to be transferred, let me know by posting a comment on this entry or by emailing me at jd_hodges_ii AT hotmail.com and I will get you transferred.

My apologies for the problems, and my thanks for your patience. I am glad to have this opportunity to upgrade folks to the better service of V2.weblogs.us and to keep weblogs.us free as always.

Respectfully,
-JD

To see which blogs have been upgraded already, check out the extended entry…

http://iceworld.weblogs.us/
http://theraindrops.weblogs.us/
http://yagottabelieve.weblogs.us/
http://pulsed.weblogs.us/
http://sandeep.weblogs.us/
http://jaxsays.weblogs.us/
http://remix.weblogs.us/
http://eastcoastagony.weblogs.us/
http://carapace.weblogs.us/
http://udidahan.weblogs.us/

2004-07-26
http://avinash.weblogs.us/
http://selvaraj.weblogs.us/
http://stevevicious.weblogs.us/
http://quan.weblogs.us/
http://daprober.weblogs.us/
among others…

45 comments

  1. Hello JD,

    Sorry to hear about the problems. Can you upgrade my account to the V2 server. (Selvaraj.weblogs.us) ?

    My blogs are in Tamil and in UTF-8 encoding format. Hopefully they will be okay as in the old server.

    Thanks
    Selvaraj.

  2. I want to upgrade my weblog but does v2 supports utf-8?I remmeber that we discussed this on forum and you said that you could not do that for that time.is it okey now?

  3. Hi guys, there is a little bit of discussion about UTF-8 here, http://ronniewilliams.net/weblogs/viewtopic.php?p=590#590

    Excerpt: “Hi Selvaraj, you are correct about V2 not support UTF-8 If you come across any other hosts that are better suited for non-english bloggers, please let us know; we would like to be ablle to help our non-english bloggers transition to a site that does a better job for them.”

    Somewhere down the road we may try to setup a seperate site that uses UTF8, also does anyone know how WordPress does with UTF8 or foreign language characters?

    I’ll be upgrading: Steve (english char), Da Prober (english char), and Quan (Unicode) today. I’m not sure how Unicode is going to work but we’ll at least give it a shot.

    Respectfully,
    -JD

  4. Hi JD,

    Can you please upgrade my blog to V2 aswell (Only when you can and have the time for it).

    Thanks again for the great service.

    Best Wishes and Regards,
    Avinash
    avinash.weblogs.us

  5. hey there,
    sorry to hear about the problems. When ya have time can ya upgrade my blog 😀 thanks.

    oo.. and how was your vacation?
    maus

  6. Hello JD,

    Please upgrade me (http://selvaraj.weblogs.us) to V2 also. I think it may still be okay. I have UTF-8 declared in the header in a meta tag so the rendering would be fine. (This is how rayan’s persian blog works without any issues).

    There may be some issues (inconveniences) in re-editing an entry. But for now, I am willing to live with it. I will test and let you know if there are other issues.

    Thanks
    Selvaraj.

  7. Okay everybody that posted but foufymaus and Monir are upgraded now. Monir, I recommend checking with some of the other bloggers that use Persian etc. and how it works (if at all) with V2. We don’t have UTF8.

    All the upgrades went well except for Quan and Selvaraj. But scratch that, I just checked http://selvaraj.weblogs.us/ and apparently changing the page headers will make things work?!

    This jsut leaves Quan’s blog as the question mark, because it uses Unicode. He’s supposed to email me and keep me posted, so we’ll cross our fingers.

    Monir, I’m going to wait until I hear from you either here or via email before I do the upgrade and foufymaus, I’ll probably do yours tomorrow or Wed (ASAP.)

  8. JD,

    Thanks for upgrading me to V2.

    Some comments:
    One could make it work by changing the headers to UTF-8 instead of the default MTCharSet which uses ISO-8859-1. However, since the actual v2 admin site is itself in ISO-8859 the previews or re-edits etc, show the characters as NCR (numeric character reference) and not as the actual unicode/utf-8 characters.

    The other problem is the default import/export to the new server must have used ISO-8859 to store the UTF-8 characters, so the multibyte format gets messed up and the old posts do not show correctly even after changing the headers.

    New posts show correctly although with the restrictions outlined in the first paragraph, as my test post/comment yesterday shows.

    And FYI, UTF-8 is one encoding to represent unicode characters, there is no “unicode encoding” as such as unicode only defines numbers for all ther international characters. Other encodings for example are UTF-16, etc, but the predominant encoding on the web is UTF-8 as it has the advantage of representing ASCII (ISO-8859) characters with the same one byte per character scheme.

    BTW, what are the restrictions on moving to UTF-8 encoding for the new server. Because of how it is designed all english language blogs should work without any problems in UTF-8. Thats how your old server was configured. That is also the default encoding prescribed by XML specs.

    But in spite of all these, I appreciate all the time and effort you put in to provide this wonderful service to your users. That’s just great. I would love to stay here, but if UTF-8 is going to be a problem, unfortunately I will have to move.

    Thanks
    Selvaraj.

  9. Hi mansour,
    I don’t think we’re going to upgrade to Movable Type 3 for the following reasons:

    #1 It might cost a lot of money, checkout Movable Type’s new licensing agreement…
    #2 Some of the plugins our users use, won’t work with MT3.

    You may want to checkout http://yarl.net/ as they may do a good job with Persian hosting.

    Respectfully,
    -JD

  10. Hi JD,
    I didn’t pay attention to the UFT-8 problem of V2, now I cannot recognize any word on my blog, I am an user from China, can you help me?

  11. Another converted: http://maus.weblogs.us/

    Thanks for the really good info Selvaraj, your description of UTF-8/Unicode etc was one of the best I’ve read.

    I think I may do another backup of all our data and then try switching to UTF-8. (this may fix your problem Quan)

    But, I’ll be on a weeklong trip starting tomorrow, and I may not be able to upgrades/changes until I get back.

    If you’ve already posted a request for an upgrade to V2 and haven’t received an email from me, you will. There’s no need to post multiple times.

    Respectfully,
    -JD

    PS Remember that if these delays/problems trouble you, the export feature on your blog should work (there has only been one problem so far out of the last 30 conversions) this should make it possible to move to another service if you need to. Please see previous post for possible persian blog host, and http://www.bloogs.com/ is an english/italian host.

    PSS if you do decide to move, and had requested an upgrade, please post here so we won’t waste out time. Thank you.

  12. PSS Does anybody know how to get ahold of Jab? He didn’t leave a valid email when he posted here, and the original email address he signed up with just bounced back. I can’t resend the instructions/login info until I get his address…

  13. Hi JD,

    Hope you can upgrade my blog to V2 when you have the time too! My blog is http://yilin.weblogs.us.

    Thanks so much for all your time that you put into maintaining this blog – I really appreciate it and I’m sure all of the rest do too!

    Cheers

  14. Hi,
    I was wondering what was going on, and decided to surf over to the main page to figure it out. It looks like my entries are gone too!

    If you could upgrade my account I would appreciate it.

    User: jandervish

    Thanks,
    Jan

  15. Hi JD
    I send many time a coment that you upgarade my weblog to v2 but you dont do my request. please upgrade my weblog. i am very unhappy becase i want to write many thing but my weblog is donat right.
    my weblog is==> http://aseman.weblogs.us

Comments are closed.