Wow. Two updates in a row. You never see that here....
The explanation is simple enough: I'm in the middle of uploading a lot of stuff, and I have nothing better to do while I wait for that to finish.
So. I'm getting lots of people asking what's wrong with the messageboard. And the simple answer is that everyone goes straight to the damned board instead of coming here to gremlin.net/main.asp to learn cool new things, like why the board's not working. So here's the explanation, for both people bothering to come here to gremlin.net/main.asp and find out....
It's broken.
That's the easy answer. More complex is that gremlin.net has moved to a new server, which is Unix, and the board used to be Unix back in the twentieth century, and then I ported it to Windoze to run on a IIS NT server, and now I'm back on Unix, so I'm retroporting the board to Unix, and that's not an easy thing to do. Therefore: the board's broken. At least until I get it unbroken and fully retroported. Again. Make sense?
Also: there'll be a new board here soon. Potentially today. A PHPBased ubercybermonster thingy. Much more stuff to play with than the board everyone's got used to over the last eight years. But you'll figure that out. Eventually. Once it's up and running and linked from somewhere. Probably from the list of links over on the left, actually. Gimee a few hours to get it working, and then playtest it for a while, and then open it up to the public.
Of course, it won't be truly public. One of the neat functions the new board has is registry. Which I'm not thrilled about personally; but it's the only way to allow for a few things I will be thrilled about. Like editing. Which also doesn't thrill me. But it thrills everyone else. Everyone else being thrilled by that might stop EMailing me to ask me to fix typos in posted messages, which might thrill me. So it should be thrilling. Once it works. Hopefully later today.
That's just one thing on the current buglist. Others include uploading the site to the new server. Which is trickier than it sounds, since gremlin.net has bloated over the last eight years into close to ten gigabytes of largely useless junk no one's seen this century. So, instead of just dragdropping the site from its 200gig drive here on my computer to the server, I'm kinda looking through the files first, and declining to upload stuff like countdowns to the twenty-first century. I'm actually hoping to trim the site down to less than a gigabyte. Then I can fill it back up to an alarming size over the next year or two.
This isn't so much of a bug as a consideration: though Version Seventeen [what you're looking at right now] is only six weeks old, it's also designed for the IIS NT server. Obviously, it works here too. But I'm contemplating a sort of revision to the site in general. Given everything else on the buglist, I'm not actually in any hurry to do that. So Version Eighteen will probably show up on schedule in July. And it'll probably show up at gremlin.net/main.php. We'll see.
There are some other bugs, but most of those are meaningless for the moment. They're actually a bit of a priority, but they're not quite worth mentioning because they're more about things I intend to add to the site than about things you're used to seeing here but which aren't currently here because they're currently bloated and lurking on my 200gig drive waiting to be jennycraiged to hell and uploaded to the new server. Which is the real priority.
There is some good news. And it's got nothing to do with insurance.
The TLD system is in place. Which is to say that I'm able to set up user.gremlin.net and allow FTP access to new subsites. After only eight years, gremlin.net is finally able to live up to its vestigial name: an ISP. So far, I've set up morphia.gremlin.net, which seems to be working. Functionally. Of course, morphia.gremlin.net is pretty outdated because, until today, there's been no way for Morphia to update his subsite, except to EMail updates to me to instal to his subsite, which never works because I'm congenitally lazy and chronically busy all the damned time. That's changed now. ftp.gremlin.net is online. Which won't do you any good without a username and password. But it's there, and it has function.
So: people who have been wanting subsites at gremlin.net [as opposed to subsites at AOHell or geocities.com or whatever] can EMail me to get one.
In a related story, webmail.gremlin.net is also online. I've got a mailserver all set up now. Or...mostly. Which is to say that it works perfectly, in function. webmail.gremlin.net is the online version, in which people with whatever@gremlin.net addresses can get their EMail through this graphical, webbased system; the same users can have their EMail delivered to, like, OutlookExpress [or whatever] through mail.gremlin.net. What I haven't yet worked out is a way to make it all fully automated. meaning that, for the moment, the only way to get an address@gremlin.net is to EMail me to get one.
Aside from that, the new server is a little faster than the old one. For the last few years, gremlin.net was clogging up a smallish server running on a 1.1mbps ADSL line. Which worked out to a total download rate of about 128 kilobytes per second. Which was dialup rates once twenty or thirty people showed up at the same time. Which was an issue. The new server is running on six T3 backbones. So those of us used to downloading 12mpbs [about 1.5megabytes per second] will be able to. And, with six redundant backbones in place, the odds of the site dropping offline are pretty well nil. Except for right now today, while less than one percent of the site is actually online. But that's on the buglist.
As for the other hundred sites I've got: they're currently still on the old ADSL server. And I've probably got a year or two to move them. It's not like Ondo evicted the site. I'm just aware that his server really only exists to run ondoher.com, and that's it's good enough to do that. Being busy and lazy and really messy, I was kinda causing a few problems by having gigabytes of junk being pulled on by gremlings all the time. So I went ahead and grabbed a server and a line capable of handling all my stuff. For the record: Ondo was as surprised by that as everyone else. This was my idea.
So. I guess that's pretty much the news. Which was pretty much the news yesterday, too. But there are a few advances. Half the buglist is deleted now; hopefully most of the other half will be taken care of by the end of the day. And I should have everything currently relevant to the site back online by the end of the week. And then I'll probably get to start all over again with other sites which still lurk on Ondo's server, using up all his space and bandwidth. But that's another biglist for another time.
More later....
--Gremlin

Forgot to add tags for this stupid entry.