ComicGen down? 8/3/05

-Fanny pack · Post by **-Fanny pack** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 8:58 am

It seems that ComicGen has died again.
[EDIT] Odd. It seems to be mostly fixed, now. Now it's just really slow and the Guide is possibly dead. [/EDIT]

Amtekoth · Post by **Amtekoth** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 10:59 am

I noticed an unusual slowdown this morning. Now it's just dead again.

Oh well. At least you have your banner showing up...

EDIT: Well, at least my banner is back...

Phalanx · Post by **Phalanx** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 12:46 pm

Kelly's currently running maintenance works, so this is routine. No need to worry too much,

http://www.livejournal.com/community/keenspace/

Amtekoth · Post by **Amtekoth** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 1:08 pm

I tend to get jumpy when the server is down. Yesterday, I emailed 40-50 people about this week's Lab Bratz strip, and I figure 10-20 of them got around to looking at it this morning...meaning that they ended up with what looks like a "broken" link.

Ugh.

That undercuts my promotional efforts, especially since it's been down so often recently. I'll be at the Wizardworld Chicago comic book convention this weekend, handing out business cards to a lot of people. I'm only hoping that when THEY come looking for my work, it'll be there for them.

You only get a chance to make that first impression once.

Glad to see that it's up now...Thanks to everyone involved!

Dutch! · Post by **Dutch!** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 1:42 pm

Aw, you just have good timing like me, that's all

Amtekoth · Post by **Amtekoth** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 2:47 pm

I know I seem pretty grumpy (see avatar at left), but it's because I'm really fired up about my work and pull my hair out when things don't go smoothly (again, see avatar at left).

Black Sparrow · Post by **Black Sparrow** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 3:27 pm

Yeah. It's stressful for everyone, but keep in mind that the admins are working at least three times as hard as the rest of us to make ComicGen work.

This is a free service after all, and it's rockin' most of the time. Anything this big's bound to have its snags.

Black Sparrow · Post by **Black Sparrow** » Wed Aug 03, 2005 3:28 pm

Yeah. It's stressful for everyone, but keep in mind that the admins are working at least three times as hard as the rest of us to make ComicGen work.

This is a free service after all, and it's rockin' most of the time. Anything this big's bound to have its snags.

Post by **Kisai** » Thu Aug 04, 2005 2:21 am

Just so people know:

"down" = can't reach it, can't ping it, I think it's dead
"slow" = still running, but something is jamming it.

I feel like I'm borrowing a page from where I used to work in giving things names that are silly, but Keenspace is -NOT- down, nor has it been "down" at all in the last 9 days. What has happened is apache choking on perl zombies (earlier last week), apache stalling out over the last 24 hours (trying to figure that one out, symtom - slow)

In other words, If you can still get to your FTP, it's not "DOWN"

I just don't want people getting the impression that keenspace is unreliable and that it has significant downtime.

The irony in this, is that the original reason I took siteadmin down was because I thought that was causing it, when kelly put it back up on a another server program, all sorts of other things started happening to it. So needless to say, siteadmin was overdue for a rework.

Siteadmin(as it is now) was originally ment to be Guide admin, and have nothing to do with the comic's backend. I wrote my own CGI handling stuff in the perl scripts which are reason for the cookie problem. (The problem is that IE doesn't follow spec. I did.)

So I'm solving the siteadmin problem by using php and using pieces from phpBB2 that work. I had originally based the session code on phpBB2's to begin with, except in perl, so there was a lot more messy stuff in perl than in phpBB2. This time around I just borrowed the session code entirely.

The idea now is to use the forums session management/use manangement and associate the comic with that login, that will allow siteadmin to be moved from server to server as necessary.

As for Guide, two things are up.
One, Guide was originally meant to replace the lack-thereof and the 5 times a day 'my comic doesn't show up in the list" help emails. So anything was better than nothing.

However it's not extendable, and people cheat it. So I'm opting for a Wiki. As you'll see, all the Author, Keywords now link to the cgwiki.comicgenesis.com site . You can EDIT this stuff with your forum login. The idea of a Wiki is that if the author doesn't have time to edit their stuff, the fanbase can. The one problem I it with it already is with namespaces. Right now it's Comic:name:whatever . There are no links to the comic from the guide. So a template needs to be made for that. Then people might figure out what to do with it.

Also the wiki search works better. My search engine is just keywords in a fulltext database, so google it is not.

Amtekoth · Post by **Amtekoth** » Thu Aug 04, 2005 3:31 am

Kisai, I have no idea what you just said.

That's okay, I don't need a translation. You're obviously hard at work solving these problems. I'll try to stay out of your way and stop complaining.

Thanks for all you do.

-Fanny pack · Post by **-Fanny pack** » Thu Aug 04, 2005 1:55 pm

Okay, cool. Thanks for the info. I apologize for the original post.