Front page broken briefly…

I’m not sure how, but performing some fairly standard WordPress operations ended up effectively destroying several tables on the main blog which runs the front page operations. I’m restoring them from backups, though AWS’ backups strategy involves creating a whole new DB instance so it’ll take a little longer than I’d like. Luckily, all the individual blogs are fine while the front page is a mess.

Ergh.

*Update* All clear. Front page’s mangled tables restored from backup. Still can’t find the exact reason they corrupted to begin with, but nightly backups are working just fine, so that’s good at least.

*Update 2* Wonderful, there were side effects that deleted many images from the S3 storage. We know what happened, and how to prevent it from happening again, but in the meantime, fixing this particular mess involves re-uploading the now-missing images. Everyone affected knows about it and will be fixing as soon as they can. Shaking out the bugs, just shaking out the bugs…

Photo by Freidwall

Front page broken briefly…
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Working on front page featured images

The front page may be a bit spartan while I try to work out how to force it to use a specific size of thumbnail, and how to go back in time and force regeneration of that size of thumbnail across all images. Sincere apologies, mea culpa and all that.

construction photo

Update 12:32am CST
Aaaand, we’re clear! Front page is now pushing out the 512×240 images wherever it can be found.

Also, RSS feed icons should be on the top bar of every blog, next to the Search and Login icons.

Working on front page featured images

On the reported RSS issues

Since launch, there’ve been several reported issues with RSS, which I’ve scrambled to try to fix before they did too much damage. But, we keep getting new requests, because the theme apparently doesn’t do a very good job of keeping track of the links, so here’s what’s wrong presently and what I’m working on to fix it.

RSS logo

  • Individual author feeds polluted with whole-network posts – originally, we had installed a plugin that served the feed from /feed for the whole network, but it turns out that it was too greedy and it also grabbed every author’s /feed URL as well. Caching RSS feed sites like Feedburner and Feedly grabbed what was in those lists, and kept them. Unfortunately, there’s not much we can do about this but wait for those to expire.
  • As a side effect of this, the theme’s expectation that the front page blog list should be accessible at http://the-orbit.net/feed/, and WordPress treating that like its own blog, means that feed is empty. The whole-network feed is actually at http://the-orbit.net/network-feed/ and it serves content from every blog. I will set up an .htaccess rule to seamlessly redirect the top level feed to the network-feed URL.
  • Once I’ve done the above point, I can change the link in the header on the front page to /feed/, thus making it more apparent that that’s the RSS feed as the CSS that provides correct iconography only auto-senses that specific URL.
  • An SEO plugin was installed to help with Facebook linking not grabbing appropriate featured images. That plugin expects all the authors’ feeds to be at /feed too. Fixing the previous point will fix the front page.
  • Some browsers don’t even care about the auto-sense URLs, so putting a prominent RSS feed icon in the top bar of every blog would be preferable. I’ll be doing that as soon as possible, as soon as other fires are quenched.

If anything else comes up, feel free to leave a comment or contact us via the contact form here.
Photo by thewritingzone

On the reported RSS issues

Need to make some CDN changes on the-orbit.net — bear with us

Sorry folks. Not a thing I particularly want to have to do on launch day, but I’m going to be switching things around to help resolve a few different problems that I’ve been seeing since we’ve gone live. All to do with statics — CSS, JS, images, etc. Things might get a bit weird.

Ughhh.

Will call out the all clear as soon as I can.

Update: welp, that was easy enough. Doesn’t seem to be any real fallout from it either. Huzzah!

Need to make some CDN changes on the-orbit.net — bear with us

So THAT’S what I’ve been up to.

I’ve sorta receded into the background lately, but with good reason. I’ve been doing the technical heavy-lifting for these new digs. They ain’t perfect, but a coat of spackle and primer and they’ll be fine.

Let me know if and when the seams start to show, either here or via the “Tech Issues?” link on every page. I’m especially interested in feedback from folks who use screen readers, because while I can sprinkle tags around and follow best-practices guides, I’m not exactly living in that mode and would love to hear from those of you who do.

There will be growing pains. There will be last-second alterations. There will be missing media, and stylistic problems, and edge cases we haven’t anticipated. But we’ve put a lot of effort into keeping all of that to an absolute bare minimum, and we’ll fix just about anything you point out as soon as possible.

It may be a while before I’m back to blogging regularly, mind you. I’ve got a lot on my plate most of the time anyway, and building and improving this place has kept me pretty occupied of late.

Welcome to The Orbit!

(Those of you visiting now because Hemant posted not an hour before I took the password box down — yeah. Greta accidentally posted her farewell post at FtB early but took it down almost immediately, but that was enough to tip someone to tip Hemant off. And the kickstarter isn’t live yet, but will be as soon as the video is complete. The social media blitz is actually scheduled for tomorrow morning, and I took the password box down early so I could get a few Jetpack and Google integrations complete before the REAL launch. Thanks for the advertising, Hemant. Wish he would have waited for the full launch, but hey. How was he supposed to know?)

We’re fully launched! Kickstarter is live! Welcome one and all!

So THAT’S what I’ve been up to.

Biting political satire!

I did what I could. My skills are modest at best.

Donald Trump in the iconic Benito Mussolini SI SI SI billboard

No but seriously, dude’s a straight-up fascist, and a big chunk of your country is creaming itself with joy at the prospect.

When President Trump takes office, I fully expect that I’ll be marked an enemy of the state and I’ll have to beat a hasty retreat, all because I ‘shopped something mean and am jealous and a yooge loser.

Biting political satire!

Sorting your video game preferences

Can’t deal with all the news of the past few days. So instead, I’m taking online quizzes and distracting myself with my self care regimen of video game consumption.

Sorting 100+ games in order of preference is no easy task, but it can be done with some perseverance. Go here for the quiz. My results below the fold. The top 20 are not surprising at all. I’d maybe sort some of the ties, of course, but the results are really uncanny otherwise.

Continue reading “Sorting your video game preferences”

Sorting your video game preferences

On the PR Disaster at #Skepticon and the lack of #ConcernedStudent1950 representation

Given how the late-addition “Q&A” session at Skepticon came into being, how it was sold to the convention, how it was advertised, and how it was “envisioned” by Danielle Muscato and Mark Schierbecker, it is no surprise the entire thing went off disastrously. Let us itemize the ways this all went wrong.

Continue reading “On the PR Disaster at #Skepticon and the lack of #ConcernedStudent1950 representation”

On the PR Disaster at #Skepticon and the lack of #ConcernedStudent1950 representation

How to survive Fallout

Our friend Dr Raychelle Burks features in this video about the science behind the lore of Fallout. Considering I just wandered back into the wasteland myself, I shall take careful notes!

How would we ACTUALLY survive a nuclear apocalypse? Well, certainly not by eating the meat of every mutated creature you kill, and every can we find of two hundred year old CRAM Processed Ham Product.

How to survive Fallout