Website Changes

Finally, after a very very VERY long long LONG wait, we got ourselves a new server to run on!

This new server platform is kindly provided by Onur Kızmaz and his company. This is an amazing offer and will enable you, the users of Popodeus, to gain access to new exciting applications. We have for some time now been restricted by slow internet access and generally busy system. This new server should show improved performance.

We would also like to take the opportunity to once again say THANK YOU to Beth Christou and Marlon Stone from Popmundo, without your donation the Popodeus domain would have been lost.

And thank you to all users of Popodeus.

Known issues:

• Popodeus.com may point at the old server IP address for a while. This is because DNS is slow in updating for a lot of users. So many people will access the old server and some will access the new. This will undoubtedly cause some synchronization issues with a few things, but we’ll have to live with that.
• We are unable to open Wordpress blog entries.
  This is because Wordpress uses Apache style .htaccess files for some redirect magic, but Popodeus only uses Tomcat, so we have to map some Wordpress URLs manually. Some links to the blog seem to be working, but not always. This could be due to slow DNS propagation too. We’ll keep investigating.

As always, if you find any problems with the new server, please send feedback, so we can fix any errors we may have caused in the move.

For instance we were hoping to upgrade everything to the latest and greatest, but we were unable to upgrade to Wordpress 3.0 so it will have to be done at a later stage.

We’re in the process of installing a new server and moving all of our data to it and later on we’ll test it for reliability etc. So far things are looking pretty decent. The transition will not happen around Thursday or Friday this week.

This new server will enable us to have a faster and reliable connection to the internet, so you should notice the site becoming quicker. This server upgrade will also mean that we can finally release some of our software that has been so long waiting for this new server (snuggly, avatar counters, more statistics and graphs etc.).

There’s lots to test and migrate so that everything works as before (or even better). So far there’s only been a few incompatibilities with the underlying file system and finding out a few hard coded paths that don’t react to all the various configuration files, but those things are easy to fix, if and when we find all of them.

So next week, we’ll have a brand new, and hopefully an always online and accessible Popodeus!

After a recompile of the Popodeus application sources and restart of the web server, the pages are drawn up twice when you load it. This is really really odd… we’re working on solving this technical issue.

And we have no clue what may be causing this glitch….

Popodeus has never set out to compete with any existing VIP features. Now that university search has been turned into a VIP service in Popmundo, I feel that keeping our service  would be bad practice and detrimental to the game. Hence I am thinking of removing the university search from my site. We want people to get VIP, don’t we?

I know my search is easier to use than the one built in, and I would also claim mine is better, except the one in the game is directly plugged in into the database and has more accurate information. My search is only a stale snapshot and the data I present quickly becomes old. Would there be a way for me to keep the search but still not compete with the game VIP features? Any ideas?

I would like to have comments about this before I delete or disable the search page.

Edit: The University Search page has now been disabled. All you can access is some interesting numbers.