Distant Parts

The Carsurvey.org web server is still stuck in support hell. I’m pretty sure it’s a hardware fault, but no one at the hosting company (The Planet) seems to have got to the source of the problem. In the medium term, I’m definitely going to move hosts, as my recent experiences support at The Planet have been very poor.

Sorry for the long wait, and if things aren’t resolved soon, I’ll just rent a server from someone else, and rebuild Carsurvey.org from my backups. That would take a day or so, plus the time needed for the DNS change to take effect, so I’m still going to give The Planet one last chance to fix the problem.

Unfortunately it’s still broken. It took 11 hours for someone to look at it, and they failed to resolve the problem (they just rebooted the server). They’re having another look now, so hopefully there will be some progress soon.

I’ve got places to be today, but I’ll be keeping up to date via my N800 (over GPRS, given that I sent my N95 back for replacement yesterday. My sense of timing is terrible).

Once the dust has settled on this, I’m going to be looking into other web hosts, as this is my second major problem within a year that hasn’t been handled very well.

Once again, I apologise for the problems, and fingers crossed, this will soon be just an unpleasant memory.

The Carsurvey.org webserver started having problems earlier today; it was frequently rebooting itself for no obvious reason.

I’ve raised a trouble ticket with hosting company, and while I’m waiting for them to investigate the problem, I’ve managed to disabled the posting of new reviews and comments, and the members area, so at least no one can waste their time posting to an unstable server.

As soon as I realised that the server wasn’t well, I grabbed a backup of the database (my last known good backup was several days old), and I’ve been able to restore this new backup onto my developement server (not publicly accessible), so if the problem turns out to be serious, very little data will be lost.

Annoying that these things always happen at a really inconvenient time. I fancied a night in front of the TV with a cold glass of white wine, but instead I’ve got a night in front of the computer with as many caffeinated beverages as I can stomach

Anyway, apologies for the downtime, and hopefully things will be back up soon. Once things are back up, I’ll probably leave keep review and comment posting turned off for a while, just to make sure things are stable.

For Carsurvey.org and related sites, I’ve just revised the pages for adding new comments. Basically:

• More concise guidelines, so less text to read
• Fixed a few silly bugs
• With the reduced guidelines, I’ve been able to reduce the number of pages from 4 to 3

Less pages and text should hopefully make for a more pleasant experience. Next week I plan to make similar changes to the pages for adding new reviews

Carsurvey.org (and related sites) have just had some minor (in code terms) changes made to them, which hopefully will make the sites more pleasant to use.

Firstly, I’ve disabled the filtering of reviews into well written and other reviews. The filtering was based on the votes by visitors and members, and while the data was usually good, there were lots of cases where the voting didn’t seem to correlate with review quality. The filtering of reviews into two pages (well written and other) also complicated the navigation, so I’ve decided that the trade off isn’t worth it, and I’ve disabled filtering in favour of simplicity.

Related to the filtering issue, is the fact that on pages listing reviews for a specific model, the reviews were ordered by year of manufacture (if appropriate), and then by date added. The date added order wasn’t obvious, and anyway, there’s a sidebar and RSS feed for people who want to see the very latest reviews.

Although the ordering by year of manufacturer still remains, I’ve now replaced the date added order by a word count order. The longest reviews will appear at the top of the page or year grouping. I personally prefer the new ordering, but please let me know if you think otherwise.

I’ve also made the sites slightly more aggressive about splitting reviews into pages for each year, as some of the pages were getting a bit too long for my taste.

I’ve just fixed a small bug in the Carsurvey.org comments pages, which may result in old comments reappearing in RSS readers.

Basically XHTML (which Carsurvey.org is), doesn’t allow for the name attribute of links (used to jump to part of a long document) to start with a number. The previous numeric name attributes have now had the letter c added to their names, which makes everything valid, but may cause RSS readers to treat the updated feeds as if they contain new comments. Apologies to anyone who gets caught out by that. It’s a one off change, in order to make the pages fully validate.

This change also applies to the motorcycle and mobile phone sites.

In response to a member’s request, the links in the members area to earlier comments have been improved. The link now shows the number of existing comments, and if no comments already exist, the link now points at the review itself.

Nothing major, but I’ve altered the left column width to allow for slightly wider ads there, while removing the header and footer ads from most pages. This should make for a cleaner site.

As long as the ad revenue doesn’t crash, I’ll make the same changes to the mobile phone and motorcycle sites in a few days time.

Following on from the recent comment filtering feature, I’ve now added AJAX voting for both the comments and reviews on Carsurvey.org and related sites.

Basically this means that for all visitors with modern browsers (IE5 to IE7, Firefox, Safari, Opera and similar) who have JavaScript enabled, their votes will be submitted without them being taken to another page. All that will happen is that the voting buttons will be disabled, and their vote will be submitted without the page reloading or changing.

For anyone who doesn’t run a modern browser, or who has JavaScript disabled, the voting process will remain unchanged, and will result in a page change when you submit your vote.

My intention is that this change will make voting faster, and if that results on more votes being cast, it should help improve the quality of the content on all the affected sites.

I’ve just done a bit of cleaning up of the smart car reviews on Carsurvey.org. The manufacturer name has been changed from the old MCC Smart to the current name of smart. In addition, I’ve grouped the fourtwo and city coupe reviews together, and I’ve changed Roadster to roadster. All this will have broken some links and RSS feeds (sorry about that), but should make the smart reviews easier to navigate in the longterm.