It took us a full week but we found a temporary fix for the gallery. So, the photo's are back online again. Have fun :-)
Sorry, our gallery at gallery.somewheresouth.net is temporary offline because the upgrade to the latest PHP version (4.4.1,1) whacked our bleeding-edge Gallery 2.0.1 install.
As we don't have a clue how to fix it and none of us has time and/or energy to repair either gallery or PHP the gallery will be down untill someone gives us the solution. (And downgrading PHP is *not* really a solution.)
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Hi there... As I have full permission of Michael to use this computer and his internet connection and as I got REALLY sick of another spam run all over the place, both here and on my dutch weblog I decided to take action today. Our solution:
When you want to add a comment you see a tiny box with a 6-digit number in it and a small box below. All you have to do is copy that number into the box below (yes that means typing it over, cut-and-paste doesn't work) and you're fine, if you fail you get a message that the security code was incorrect. This may sound simple and easy to circumvent but as the number is actually an image and due to the grey background not very easy for computers to substract from the image it should work quite allright. Untill the spammers found a way to circumvent this off course...
I'm very sorry that I had to take this kinda impopulair step, it makes it harder for you to add a comment but Jeroen (jnieuwen) and we remove the spam every coupla days you don't see too much of it but we get spammed in the comments with ~200 spams at least every weak. I can imagine better things to do with my sparse computertime here. (So for Jeroen, deleting all those spams from weblog and email is absolutely no fun for him.)
Cya later!
Murf
I did an upgrade from MovableType 3.01D to 3.121 as it has some major and minor improvements, including a small speed boost rebuilding the log. I have also upgraded the back-end of MovableType from Berkely DB to MySQL and changed all static content to dynamic content.
Probably this sounds like an odd combination Chinsese, Russian and Swahili to you, but it basically means that there are severe speed-improvements and the log used a more stable and common used back-end. You don't have to wait 13 seconds when posting a comment anymore, it should now be done in 4. Same for Nicky and me using the publishing-features, instead of having to wait 23 seconds adding an entry should be less than 5 seconds or so. And that's definetely something worth mentioning as I was freaking out having to wait half a minute just adding some content or even more changing the lay-out of the site.
To be quite honest, I already did the upgrade last saturday but somehow Murphy's Law stroke so the upgrade wasn't quite as successfull as it should have been and I couldn't use all the improvements coming with 3.121. Duplicate entries showed up on the log but where definetely not in the database. I've upgraded my own weblog (which is 99% identical to this one) exactly the same way and that was 100% successfull after screwing the complete log, so I was completely lost... Today I tried one of the last resorts, exporting all the entries, clearing the whole weblog and re-importing them again. You might have seen that the weblog was actually 5 minutes offline and after that all the entries where publishes by Murf instead of most by Nicky. But, it seems to be fixed by now...
Again: if anything looks strange, let me know, I simply can't test every single page...
I've just upgraded the gallery software as there was a security bug in the previous version. Nothing should be changed though but if you notice anything strange about the gallery, please let me know...
As you can see I've fiddled a bit with the design of SomewhereSouth. Tossed out the kayeshu.net-purple, grayscaled the top-images and made the links to the gallery and statistics a bit more visible. (They're now also at the top of the page!) I hope you like it though the design may look a bit cold to you.
Just small things you do when your girlfriend is still 79 days away from you and one of many ways of saying that she's still in your mind 24/7...
For all of you who are waiting for the mailinglists to become alive, well, here they are...
There are 2 mailinglists, one which only Nicky and I can use to announce things we like to announce. The other one if you like to communicate with those left behind. You can easily subscribe by sending email to tripnews-request@somewheresouth.net (or tripnews-discussion-request@somewheresouth.net) with in the body of the email the word "subscribe". You will then recieve an confirmation email wich you have to take action on. After that you're automatically welcomed on the list and can send email to all members of the list. In that email you will find some information about how to manage your subscribtion and how to send email to the list.
Some information and the archive about the somewheresouth mailinglists is on:
http://lists.somewheresouth.net/
Keep in mind that the archive is not public, and that only members can have a look at the archive. Keep also in mind that any email sent to the lists is discarded without notice unless you are subcribed to that particular list and you use the correct email address. Any email sent to the announcelist will be discared as well.
If you have questions, don't hesitate to email me (Harmen / Murf), as I am the maintainer of the mailinglist at least untill I leave the Netherlands as well to meet my lovely girlfriend down under, something which unfortunately won't happen untill januari 6th, 2005.
Unfortunately I had to disable the subcription option on the log. I introduced a new one, so that you could easily get email when a new entry on the log was made but luck was not on my side... The feature didn't to what I wanted it to. However, the feature is being worked on, but is just not ready yet... Untill then the feature is gone and I disabled all subcriptions currently made.
As soon as the feature is implemented I'll announce it here. Until then, you might have a look at an RSS reeder. A tool like that will help you up-to-date with logs like this. You will find the rss feeds here or at the bottom of the page...
Just a small note to let you all know that the photo-gallery just became live @ http://gallery.somewheresouth.net/