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I don't think that moving forum topics to the Romper Room is doing the members any justice. Although they are a little hot on fire but they are still serious topics talking about real issues that concerns the welfare of Blogdrive members. They don't deserve to be in the Romper Room because they are not ill-mannered or arguing for the sake of arguing.
Moving these topics away from the main branch (in this case Helpee's on Fire) is like China's media control policy. I think forum moderators should re-evaluate what they move away from the main branch. It feels like censorship to me. Please reconsider this and move them back to where they really belong.
On the issue of Blogdrive's downtime, that's what I've been saying to myself for the past god knows how long. Maybe it'll get better tomorrow, maybe it'll get better tomorrow, I should just leave this work until tomorrow, it'll get better tomorrow and so on...
And now I wonder how much patience can you give to something that doesn't give you any results at all.
And worst of all having to be insulted by another one of Blogdrive's pacifier, sigh such is the world in US of America.
Everything is officially back to normal, no not normal, I mean up and running. Since normal would mean its down or still under maintenance or unavailable in Blogdrive terms.
This is yet another major disaster. Seeing that more people participate in the forum doing the "complaining" dance. And as usual, the Blogdrive defenders (as in Sinja, JfZ and others) would step in to "defend" Blogdrive.
These people are the saviours of Blogdrive, although they are very much unappreciated both by Blogdrive and people who are angry with the service. The defenders would stand up for Blogdrive no matter what it takes, including snapping pirate's neck, being insulted for masturbating in the server room, or having sexual intercourse with one of the server wire host. (eww...)
I, in my opinion, to be honest, in my honest opinion don't like the attitude of these defenders one bit. Here are the stereotypes:
1) they lie, that the service is running smoothly when it isn't.
2) they make fun of angry Blogdrive users posters, a big NO to customer services and professionalism. Though I must admit, they don't have one single bit of reason to provide professional customer service to these people, they are VOLUNTEERS.
3) they think, it's just blogging, it's just a blog, it's just a blog host, it's just a downtime. They fail to understand the importance and economic value of service downtime. OR they knew but they are just doing what they do best, defending Blogdrive.
4) they think, it's a free service, don't complain. And if you pay, just be patient.
What I really hope for them, at the very least is to be honest with the users, do not insult their problems, and do not ever, EVER say that blogging is just another piece of toilet paper.
Sigh. Will they ever understand? Guess not.
From a topic in the forums, in responce to Klubbkidd's frustration and many other fellow bloggers: http://www.blogdrive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=25338#25338
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I paid (for three years), I get kicked in the ass too.
Klubbkidd, I've been following your blog every now and then. I also know the volume of visitors you attract, I believe it's in the thousands per day category making it one of the most popular blogs on Blogdrive.
However, seeing that you are doing a serious business you should have left Blogdrive a long time ago. There are better service out there not to mention they are free too.
When BD announced that they are moving data centers, I crossed my fingers and hoped that this'll be the last time we'll be having any problems or discomfort. Till now, one month later it's just as it is before. Pointless.
I guess the only thing you'll lose when you switch, which would also be the most crucial part of it all, is your current blog address. That alone bring many other big disadvantages: Your permalinks and status that you've gathered up until today will all be lost, losing out in search engine rankings. And the complication with what your visitors are familiar with.
My advice to you is this: give BD one more chance, say two weeks. If this big moving of data center doesn't get better in two weeks, by all means, MOVE. Get outta Blogdrive, don't let your potential be hold back by some Californian startup. Flap your wings and fly.
For many times now, Blogdrive have chosen to insert an additional text into all blogs and pages "informing" users they are upgrading servers. Sure, we should actually be grateful that they are in fact "informing" us, which under normal circumstances, they don't.
Blogdrive automatically inserts this line of code into the end of all files stored on Blogdrive. Including CSS and JS files.
<p align=center>Upgrading servers.
We'll be back up in a few of minutes.
We are currently storing submitted entries
for later processing.</p> Now, let's not let the issue of "informing" users of downtime. The issue I'm facing now, has to do with Blogdrive, automatically inserting additional text into my .js files, making them obsolete and not working. I use lotsa external javascript files which are hosted on Blogdrive. But whenever they insert this tags, all my blogs would fail to execute. So the solution to this problem, without informing Blogdrive of the problem (as they are always too "busy" to pay any attention to a Magnum (plan 4) subscriber such as myself), I simple insert a double slash at the very end of all my js documents. It does the trick, wonderfully. By inserting a double slash, I basically "comment-out" the auto-inserted code. Oh, how genius of me to stop a war, not get angry fix the small problem.
Blogdrive is a great *cough* blogging software, however it isn't the most search engine friendly blog platform around.
New entries or blogs tend to get higher ranking than old post because of Blogdrive's way of handling 404 pages. These new content, either entries or blogs receive a large amount of incoming links from Blogdrive main page and 404 pages. (The number of incoming links is porportional to your page rank.)
As a result, if you regularly updates your blog, your blog will naturally have higher page rank due to these incoming links. (Tip 1)
Other methods, will largely depend on the design and internal HTML coding of your blog.
Tip 2: Insert permalink of important post you made to your sidebar. Since your sidebar appears in every single page of your entire blog, it naturally gives a high number of incoming links. It helps a lot.
Associating keywords to your individual post have a tremendous help of relating to relevant searches. This, however is difficult because Blogdrive system doesn't help in this aspect, at all.
A little hack here and there in the HTML makes a difference.
Such as this blog, each permalink pages have it's Blog Title in the title bar. This is done by forcing individual blog post title into the <title> tag. (Tip 3) This method makes your permalink page rank goes up a significant one PR (PageRank)
Another method, is to link to your individual post with the relevant keyword. Either in your blog, or your friend. Let's consider this as Tip 4.
Tip 5: A newly discovered method by myself, is to insert your blog title into your permalink. Currently, all permalink has the format http://seigey.blogdrive.com/archive/360.html with no specific keyword in the URL. If we make it look like this:
http://seigey.blogdrive.com/archive/360.html?Search+Engine+Friendly+BlogDrive
I consider this as another genius idea of mine and I gladly share it with all. Have fun.
Surprice surprice! Blogdrive announced that they will be doing server maintenance from 3/10 till 5/10 (or was it just the 4th and 5th?).
Can you believe it? they actually took the courtesy to let us know! I'm so happy for them. Yay!
This can be found on the left bottom corner the moment you login.
http://www.blogdrive.com/manage/
Update to the update: 10/04/06:
We will be performing some more maintenance tomorrow, 10/05/06 between the hours of 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM PST.
Update 10/03/06:
We will be performing some routine maintenance on 10/04/06 between the hours of 11:00 AM to 8:00 PM PST. Sections of the site may not accessible during this time.
Blogdrive Team
And on the Blogdrive Update site (http://update.blogdrive.com/archive/6.html) is a new entry regarding the server maintenance.
Wow... I'm soo glad! I hoping Blogdrive will continue doing this in the future.
This is really cool, Google added tabbing to their personalised homepage project, we can add as many tabs as possible, too. This will help with loading time significantly and it's a good thing, very good and way better than the other module hacks.
Oh by the way, the modules that I wrote are now listed in Google Directorys. Yahoo!
Check them out!
http://www.google.com/ig/directory?q=blogdrive
Have fun
The Sagrada Familia Church by Gaudi is one of the most magnificent church/catedral I've ever visited. It's been under construction since half a century ago, and will not be ready for another half a century.
Just as is Blogdrive.
As everybody already know, Blogdrive has recently moved their data center, promising every blogdriver a better service with less down time. I was very looking forward to this event as this would definitely make Blogdrive a competent blogging platform. (And benefit my fellow readers  )
To me, Blogdrive is a wonderful work of art, programming, business and internet technology. Of course by saying that, I did not take into consideration the frequent downtime, the rude customer service, the slow responce time (in terms of everything: customer service, releasing new upgrades, and server fixes), the defensive sensitive forum regulars, and of course the deadly-inconsiderate-evil-money-minded spammers.
There are a few conspiracies regarding what actually happened behind the scenes. AH hah! I knew you love conspiracies. 
The move started on June 29th, as indicated in this entry. But by July 21st, it still wasn't completed. It was until Auguest 30th where there were signs of "almost done". Till now, I'm not sure if they are completely finished with the move but the red notice that was in the blog management area were now removed. After two months.
Michael has always been very good at telling stories, I loved the way he put things into an easy to understand, emotionally touching story line. But what really happened isn't always what the story claims, usually. It's true that the real Blogdrive crew consists of Michael, Tim, Jeff and Rick. Each specializing in different areas.
What's untrue is... the number of servers claimed. There's only one server, for all I know. And judging from the quality of server responce time, nothing has changed.
It is kept very cold inside to keep the thousands of servers safe from heat damage. It is also very loud in the data center due to the monster ACs and the thousands of server fans running.
Thousands of servers... right! Has Blogdrive improved their service so far? I, still see no difference.
I wonder why no one has requested this until now, Gloria proposed we create a wikipedia page for Blogdrive in the forums. With failed attempt.
So, I'm proposing a different approach. We'll have to show wikimods how important Blogdrive is to be included in the best online encyclopedia. In order to do that, we should do what we does best, blogging!
So people, start blogging for Blogdrive!
Tags: wikipedia, blogdrive,
As always, Michael make up good stories on his expriences working on Blogdrive. I'm afraid it might dissappear one day like the other stories so I decided to post it here too. You can head over to the forum and read them all there. This is also a n update of their progress in moving data centers.
(Short version)
I apologize for the down time we've been experiencing. Things are looking quite good now. After performing a system upgrade to power hardware on 8/26/06 we were faced with an unexpected challenge that caught us off guard. It took a while to identify the cause which is why it was difficult if not impossible to give an ETA to Blogdrive members during this time. We did attempt to place info on the home page; however this was not always viewable. Thank you for your patience. We will do our best to make certain this does not happen again.
(Long version)
The day the world went away
The events of 8/26/06 explained:
It was morning. Another sunny day here in Southern California, filled with magic and wonder. Nothing out of the norm. Little did we know tragedy was just around the corner for Blogdrive.
We were adding some hardware to the Blogdrive array of servers; line conditioners, rebooters, etc. We had to shut down all of Blogdrive to do this, which is not unusual as we shut down servers often to perform repairs and such. Shutting down and starting up servers is done in a specific sequence. We are schooled in this and did not anticipate any difficulties. However, after reboot something went terribly wrong.
Tim is our main server programmer. Besides being a great programmer he is also an awesome drummer (He insisted that I put the word "awesome" in there.) We have the servers setup to send Tim pages via his cell phone when they are in trouble. They were in trouble. Tim's cell phone sounded like an unstoppable mini Star Wars battle in his pocket.
The "data center" is where all the blogdrive servers are housed (there is also an outside backup location.) The data center occupies an entire floor of a very large building in Los Angeles. The security there is very tight. There are guards with monitors, a security desk, an area to place your entire hand for identification and several cards and keys to open doors and elevators. There are rows of racks and cages. It is kept very cold inside to keep the thousands of servers safe from heat damage. It is also very loud in the data center due to the monster ACs and the thousands of server fans running. Tim is often herd yelling "Speak up!" and "Why is everyjuan friggin' whispering on me?!"
Many of the Blogdrive servers are setup in a redundant array, each with multiple drives duplicating data and exchanging load and requests. This way if a drive fails or explodes or moves on to the next life, we can change it out for a new juan, re-sync it to the others and begin replicating data again. This means no data is lost and no down time experienced.
Needless to say when the pages started flooding in we all panicked; in a calm inward maintained programmer-like panic. All of the servers started shutting down and rebooting on there own in a crazy Ghost in the Machine kinda way. Tim with a link via computer tried to intervene and connect a minimum of resources to gain some control of the situation. They would not have it. I along with Jeff and Rick started pulling severs out of the cages and connecting them to other power sources. I held juan of them in my arms as it was convulsing. I looked over at the guys and screamed, "Is this how it ends? Is this how it ends?!" I set the dying server down and placed my hands to my head, slowing stepping back, then started screaming uncontrollably like a little girl. Or so they tell me.
It seemed there was nothing we could do to put an end to this madness. We checked everything; rebooters, switches, routers, etc. There was nothing. We then really started to panic, in a "what do you mean we're out of coffee?!" kinda panic. We pulled all the servers off line. Blogdrive went silent.
We brought many of the servers home with us to repair any damages that occurred to the data base, and or hardware. As I drove down the street I thought about all the servers I was carrying, the Blogdrivers and all their blogs, all their stories. I also thought about my driving skills, the fact that I was almost out of gas and had juan headlight out. Over the period of a few days we repaired damages and were able to put minimum systems online. We continued to work on the servers at my home. We slept when we could; me in my bedroom and Tim on the sofa, no funny business here. We assumed that we had experienced a strange power spike. We posted what we could to Blogdrive members. Although we did not have an eta, after much thought we knew we were close to an answer.
After further inspection of the servers, Tim felt the answer must be in the power source; something fluctuating in power, something undetected by the other equipment. It was juan of the most improbable possibilities. It would mean that the actual power source coming to the Blogdrive cages in the data center was at fault. This is like blaming a wall outlet. Very unlikely.
We brought the servers back to the data center. With new meters we tested the power source to the cages. It was true! There were severe power fluctuations in the line. It apparently caused damage to the equipment used to protect us from such things. Quickly we re-routed the power to a clean source. We mounted the servers and began syncing them. They were very happy. Blogdrive went back online with full functionality in the early hours of 8/30/06. It will take a week or so to get everything completely up to snuff, but this should not show much influence on the system.
I'd like to apologize to anyjuan affected by this challenge. We had never experienced such an outage before. We will do our best to keep such events from ever happening again.
I'd like to thank the following people:
Veronica over at Fry's Electronics - You got it going on baby!
The folks at Dunken Doughnuts – Remember, it's all about the Maple Bars.
Tracy at the security desk – Thanks for locking me out twice!
My girlfriend Erin who said – "Did you know there's a guy sleeping on our sofa"
I'd also like to thank all the Modulators including JFZ, Ang, Anthony and Sinj for their support. You guys rock me!
Btw,
During the wee hours of the morning at the data center I saw ghosts roaming through the various server cages and hallways. I tried to track them down, you know, to speak with them, but they kept disappearing. They seemed to be dancing at times, wearing nice clothing and such. I was tired. Sounds like a Made For TV movie to me.
Michael
Blogdrive
Update:
We'll be moving data centers on 6/29/06. During this time Blogs will be displayed but will only show posts that were made up until 6/28/06 5 PM PST till after the move is complete.
That was about a month ago when the notice is put up. I wonder when will the work be finished, or if they have already completed the work. Speaking of being efficient.
Funnily and oddly, website traffic dropped approximately three fold. Bad, very bad. What could be the reason?
Being a blog hosted on Blogdrive, naturally at first instinct the blame would go to Blogdrive's bad down time.
Hey come on now, we (I above all ) should all know better than just blaming Blogdrive. Some form of investigation was taken and guess what I found?
Google is the culprit:
 sigh...
But why can't I see my blog?
I hear you. It's not just you, me too (and as ARS reported it in the forums too)
As many of you know, I'm a computer nomad. I don't make love to the same computer all the time. It's not that I'm cheating or unloyal, I do have feelings for these machines but it's just that ... I'm non-commitment kinda guy. I just want to enjoy myself as much as the computer does. Live for the moment, Carpe Diem. You know what I mean?
Anyway, back to the main topic. I had no problem accessing the admin section or the Blogdrive forum but I can't get to my blog, or any other blog for that matter. The funny thing is, I can access all blogs that are FEATURED as Blogdrive Favorites. Not any others.
This is racism. Just because I'm not on the favorites, shouldn't I get to access my blog?
As I was saying, I travel around, a lot. I've had experience with young, beautiful and energetic new flat-screen desktops with smart, intelligent operating systems (winXP). To old, mature but rock solid late-90s computer who likes long walks around the lake, dogs and cats. One of these days, I'll try to get my pants into the new Vista baby. And no, it's not paedophile.
My point is, from all these different computers there are some times (especially these few days) where I CAN or can NOT reach my blog. And guess what, it has nothing to do with the differences of these computers. It's their location or rather ... their connection source, a.k.a. Internet Service Provider. It became harder to get to my blog if the internet connection I get is rather dodgy, like a wireless network, proxy connection or dynamic IP addresses.
SO,
speculation of the day is:
Blogdrive disables blogs connection to dodgy computers.
why?
 my guess, based on what I've been suffering for the pass few days is to fight spam. I've received more than 50 odd contact form spams in two days. Click on the image to have a better view.
Now, how is this fair? I'm a subscriber but I can't get to my blog. What about my visitors? For your information, my visitor stats have been down by 50%. It's a huge traffic blog so stats differences are very notable despite daily fluctuations.
Lets look on the brighter side of things. By cutting connection to dodgy computers, spam attacks can be reduced and this saves the server from crashing again. At least, Blogdrive isn't entirely down. Right?
But what about those that do have an account here, are loyal Blogdrive users and even are subscribers. Why can't they be exempt from being classified as dodgy? Why can't they get access to their own blog? at the very least.
Dear readers, do you have other ideas as to why I can't get access to my own blogs?
 UPDATE: ~justme~ » "Posting from this IP is not allowed. You are posting from an IP/proxy server that is known to distribute SPAM and the author of this blog blah blah blah
justme was having trouble commenting, whatever happened to the antispam feature introduced not too long ago?
Tags: Blogdrive, ISP, spams, internet service provider,
Good news! Remember the last time I talked about co.mments? I was just talking to Assaf yesterday and they have added support to track comments on Blogdrive. I must thank him for the quick response and how fast he wrote up a parser specifically for Blogdrive. I think it's a great service and I'm hoping that in the near future everyone will start using it.
 The great thing about this service is that you can track any comments, whether if it's your blog, other Blogdrive blogs or even other blog services. It works great! All you need to do is just "Bookmark" that blog.
Also, it is possible to generate a Comment RSS for your blog. Look at mine.
This would save me a lot of time going from blogs to blogs trying to see if I get a responce from a comment I left earlier. Or if there are comments by other people on a particular topic.
Go sign up an account now. Signing up for an account allows you to have all your conversations stored.
Tags: blogdrive, co.mments, comments, track,
While we are constantly complaining about how much Blogdrive can improve, let's take a moment to be reminded of all the good stuff we have here on Blogdrive that you shouldn't have known.
If you are reading this article right now you should turn off the lights and make sure there's nobody behind you. If you are discovered to have obtain these information, an assassin will be sent to murder you.
1) Built-in search feature - Search your own blog with the blogdrive's built-in search feature, it's originally only available for subscription blogs but if you use a GET method on your url, you'll get a free (temporary) feature. However, it only search your blog titles.
2) exceed your bandwidth - for free accounts, an allocated amount of 50mb monthly bandwidth can be exceeded even without any upgrades. If you have a subscription blog, your allocated monthly bandwidth will be higher but again your files will not fail to load in the event that you exceeded it. So, what are you complaining about? (please note: you can't store more than what you should)
3) store HTML / CSS / JS documents in your filemanager with .jpg extensions. Okay, this is supposed to be a techy hack but it works.
4) the amazing Seige - this isn't just a goodie thingy but the coolest lad I've ever known on Blogdrive. He's smart, brilliant and above all massively fantastic. Oh, did I mention that he's got a great sense of humour?
Do you have other ideas or suggestions?
Tags: blogdrive secrets goodies
Everyone's been lovey dovey over the new WYSIWYG editor (JfZ, future, forum guide, hacks) While I, despite my initial "enthusiasm", still think that it has lots of problem room for improvement.
The WYSIWYG editor is at the very core, the most important feature on Blogdrive. Without it... you would be wondering how a blog host can ever be a blog host. And we really don't expect writers to be able to write properly, right?
1)  Insert Link opens a new window? This has to be the most annoying small problem. Everytime I need to insert a link, I'll need to wait till the new window loads before I can do anything else. This is a pain especially on MSIE because it takes a long time for MSIE to open a new window. Blogdrive should really just reduce to using a "prompt" javascript function to do the magic. It's less complicated and faster. Not to mention no new HTTPrequest to the Blogdrive server while editing.
Another problem is that it'll not work if the text you highlighted contains an apostrophy ' or ' . For example if you write: "Seige's dog", and wanting to add a link to these words, it'll not copy the "Seige's dog" to the window. This is a Javascript bug.
2) Different browser syntax rendering - on Firefox it's "XHTML Transitional" while on MSIE it's "plain old HTML" with CAPITALS. You can notice the differences if you use the "HTML View" feature located at the right bottom of the editor. It's odd although
3) Up Down Left Right button doesn't work sometimes - can't move the focus of the text cursor basically but the weird thing about this is... it only happen sometimes. And as for me, I can't identify what is the source of this problem.
4) In HTML View, the text cursor isn't always where it should be - more often than not it appears to be one or two characters away. How and why this happens is a mystery. It usually happens when I have a long entry that I needed to edit. It has something to do with miscalculating the string lengths or something along those lines.
5)   Undo/Redo doesn't work sometimes - Again, this is odd and I can't tell why it doesn't work. It happens to both Firefox and MSIE.
6)   Outdent/Indent uses different elements sometimes - I would really prefer the editor to implement the <BLOCKQUOTE> elements, it works great on MSIE but on Firefox, it uses <div> with margins set to indent it... how cruel.
7) Save post to clip board works on MSIE only - it doesn't work on Firefox mainly because Firefox is stupid for not supporting the copy-to-clipboard function. Sadly.
8) Firefox browser crash when reloading editor sometimes - Again, this is another one of the "sometimes" problem. It's just weird and I just can't make it out why. Don't take me wrong that it could be other webpages I'm viewing because the window crashed a few times and it's always during reloading of the editor in Firefox.
9) Can't insert Scripts or Objects - That's due to security reasons but for someone like me who do need to use some Javascripts, it's . Though... I shouldn't fret because I still have the beloved PTE.
10) Help Guide is coming soon ever since the big bang - See that "?" up there on the top right hand corner? Ever clicked on it, No? Don't bother.
I somehow realise that all these problems have almost everything to do with browser inconsistencies. Still I don't see why an editor should be flawed just because of certain browser not working perfectly well.
Wondering if Blogdrive will ever be bothered to fix these minor things? Nah, never. Not in a century or two.
Ever since Blogdrive fixed the PTE, it has so far been a million times better than WYSIWYG editor. Although it doesn't mean it's all great (because it doesn't work all well in Firefox/Opera), it's still better than WYSIWYG editor.
Tags: Blogdrive, WYSIWYG, Plain Text Editor, PTE, Editor,
 |  | | Before | After | Year 2003, it was the best thing that happened to our tiny little existance.
It was user-friendly, great features, wonderful customer services, almost no down time.
It was ranked one of the top five blogging services around.
| Today, we are back to tiny little, almost non-existing creature.
Bugs are flying everywhere, spammers constant attack, poor customer service, downtime all the time (hey, it rhymes).
Not even considered for ranking.
| So people, tell me what exactly is wrong here?
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