Tony's blog

I grew up in Townsville and used to spend all of the school holidays on Magnetic Island at my grandparents place. Now days we live about 1300km away and haven't made the effort to visit for about 8 years.

Last weekend was my uncles 80th birthday, so we had a family reunion at the old house on Magnetic Island. My children got to meet nieces, nephews, uncles and aunts they didn't know they had.

Magnetic Island was named by Captain James Cook after his compass played up. It's a beautiful place where time seems to slow down as soon as you step off the boat. There are nice quiet beaches, plenty of bird life with and without feathers, wallabies, fish and koalas.

As if I haven't had enough challenges over the last week or so.
Mail has not been sending to external email addresses. My simple testing used local email addresses which went through fine and contact email were working so I had no reason to expect anything was wrong. Thanks Kevin for contacting me and letting me know.

So if you signed up recently and are wondering what happened to your registration email, now you know.
Click on the "Request new password" link to receive a password.

I am sorry for any inconvenience caused. This should be added to my signature.

Last week, after the site upgrade we were hit pretty hard by bots, crawlers and spiders while they tried to re-index all of the site content. Luckily things seemed to have calmed down a lot since then.
As a means for keeping tabs on what bots are online when and if we get hit hard again I have created a simple module to log and display visits by robots. If you are logged on and there are some bots on line you will see a 'bots online' box on the left hand side. It provides a simple visual of how many nodes (pages) are being visited by bots over the previous 15 minutes.
The module only detects a few of the popular bots and is not meant to be 100% accurate. In time I can use the information logged to block out some bad bots or refine the module.

Over the last couple of years one of the fastest growing web technologies has been RSS. RSS along with other similar content syndication formats such as Atom have come from nowhere to become a big part of many peoples live. I for one use a feed reader each morning to check the latest news on the web. It's quicker and easier then visiting all the site I frequent to see if anything new has been published.

One of the new features of this site, that may have been overlooked by many of you, is the syndication ability. Just about everything can be read through a feed reader if you know where to look. At the bottom of many pages you will find this syndicate content image: which you can right click and 'Copy link location' to your feed reader of choice.

The upgrade was a major task and we have and still are experiencing some issues. The main issue that will not be resolved is the loss of about two weeks data. I am very sorry about that loss and in the short term many of you will be affected one way or another. I had many versions of the the database and may have dumped and installed the wrong one. As I had many other issues to resolve at the time I didn't notice the missing data until it was too late to do anything about it.

Let me attempt to explain how the day of the upgrade went.
I awoke early Sunday morning full of energy and ready for the challenges ahead. Over the previous couple of weeks I had dumped converted and tested the data numerous time and I felt that this was the day.