Since Monday, November 9th 2009, in the afternoon, all secure pages on the site from the log in page to the subscription system are causing browsers to report an expired security certificate error. Impact: Not much really. The certificate still works for encryption, so no data is ever compromised. All a user has to do [...]
Today, the 21st of September 2009 I rolled out preliminary support for portable devices with small screens. This support is restricted to story display and the new stories list and the updated serials list. I will be rolling out support in other pages gradually. For now, if you stumble on bugs, let me know and [...]
Alright, so we’ve moved. The move yesterday took about two hours from when the servers were shut down to the site being accessible again. It was fairly uneventful. However, the site is not back up to to its old normal self. We’re still missing the hefty hardware required for content search. We’re running on a [...]
Again, with a problem that took the site offline for a considerable amount of time. So, what happened? Well, it turned out that the hosting location that I have the servers in, is in the process of being closed down. They didn’t give me prior warning. So there were people moving servers and racks to [...]
Due to some new constraints, I have had to make some changes to the scheduling of delayed postings. From now on, instead of posting delayed stories and chapters at midnight Eastern time, it will be at 9pm Eastern time.
Well, it does. When it rains it seems to come from all sides. Last night, a network outage 10 days after the last one. Tonight, a catastrophic hardware failure in the database servers’ raid at 8:15 pm on the 27th. We’re scrambling to find and configure a replacement. It will definitely take a while and [...]
When I started implementing the site’s various RSS feeds, I took the easy road and I used a token in the URL itself for authentication. It was an acceptable solution all that time ago. However, with the proliferation of RSS aggregators and their facilities for finding RSS feeds, I found that I could easily subscribe [...]
Today I implemented a couple of small changes that may be of interest. First one is on the readers’ side. For premier members, the Universe/Series listings page now allows you to sort by multiple criteria. You can have the page sort the listings by Universe or series name (the default), by author name, by story [...]
I’ve made an experimental change to the storiesonline’s listings pages stylesheet that causes check marks to appear next to visited links. The reason for this change is to help those with color blindness who are unable to see the difference in color between visited and unvisited links. There is no functional difference from before, and [...]
I’ve implemented some important changes in the story delivery mechanism today. The new system has the ability to deliver long stories or long chapters in multiple pages. Explanation: Storiesonline is a busy site. Very busy site. In order to keep the site running smoothly and responding as fast as possible to readers’ requests, the reply [...]