the bibli.ca blog

Bibli.ca update - downtime is over?!

Monday, January 23, 2006

As some of you may have noticed, bibli.ca has suffered quite a bit of down time lately. I apologize greatly for that.

The major blackout was on the day I was moving apartment (surprise surprise). Bibli.ca (and my other sites) were down for more than a day, since my hosting provider have decided that bibli.ca was crashing the server it was running on. Unfortunately, they did not call me before taking all of the sites down, hence I discovered this well after due time, only when my internet connection in the new "lab" was up and running.

Yesterday, bibli.ca has returned a "mime type download box" to the browser. I have never figured out why, and never got an answer from my hosting provider wether it was due to something that they have done, and later fixed - or not. Black magic is back.

Todays downtime was due to the fact that I did not periodically clear bibli.ca's session information for the server.
It even got TextDrive to blog on it. stupid me.

I am now putting some effort making sure this will not happen again, introducing better monitoring, and better "Backoffice" management of the bibli.ca service. Thanks for your continued patience.

10:12 AM | Permalink |

Site continues normally while Guy is going offline, be back on Monday...

Thursday, January 12, 2006

First of all, I want to thanks all the people writing me. It is really a pleasure seing that these creations are valuble for so many people. I consider all of you "founding fathers" of the zingo family.
The bad part, is that I am moving apartment on Sunday, and will be mostly offline from now until Monday next, when I resurface. Coming to think of it, I can't believe how hard it is for me being away from the Internet for such a long period of time. I will be reading emails, but won't be developing any zingos those days.
When I get back, I already have a "zingo" that I am planning to cook. I hope it will be "the mother of all zingos" if I might quote Mr. Saddam.
I made arrangements for the zingos to continue their constant updates while my home linux boxes are offline, and hope all will be well on that front. I would like to take this opportunity to thak Mathew for helping me out. While you're at it, checkout his project: sprol.com - the worst places on the world.

technorati tags: guy tavor, offline, update, bibli.ca

8:24 AM | Permalink |

Early morning server downtime

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

The servers (bibli.ca as well as buzzingo.com) were down for a short while (about 20-30 minutes) this morning just before 6am PST (2pm UTC).

Sorry for the inconvinience.

technorati tags: update, bibli.ca, buzzingo, downtime, textdrive

6:08 AM | Permalink |

More New Features

Sunday, January 01, 2006

HAPPY NEW YEAR! New features:

creation recommendation is margins
colors to recommendations and sidelines
homepage popular creations - shows the 10 most popular creations relative to their creation date
ping weblogs.com when you post a new story.

I went to great length in order to make your creations score high on Google and MSN search results. Try searching for your full name (as given on registration) - and find your bibli.ca creation posting.
The last feature in the list above, makes sure that everytime you submit a story to biblica, it is crawled by various blog searchers (blogsearch.google.com, icerocket, and virtually all other blogsphere tools) further extending your reach, and potential readership.

Enjoy.

technorati tags: bibli.ca, guy tavor, blog search, feature, update, publish, share, creative writing

9:36 AM | Permalink |

Picking up speed

Emily Chang's eHub has recently mentioned Bibli.ca. This drove a significant amount of new readers, and a share of new authors to bibli.ca

Following user requests, I have implemented "remember my login" option. Thus, when logging in next time, the system will remember your login on your browser, saving you the bother to re-logging in each time you visit the site.

Feel free to send requests, rants, raved, questions to guytavor@bibli.ca

technorati tags: bibli.ca, guy tavor, publish, creative writing, ehub

5:52 AM | Permalink |

Introducing sidelines - short snippets anyone can add

Wednesday, December 21, 2005

At the past couple of days, I got some excellent input from Tom Carpel, Bill Lazar and Dean Nehama. Following their input, many little fixes were introduced, among them are:

Changed the tag cloud to be more spaced out - thus readable
Dean pointed out that the margins are empty. Hence, the "sidelines" were introduced. Sidelines are bits of text that anyone can add (even non-registered users). These appear at the margins in the explore and creation pages (for instance: friends / choco man)

Did I already mention that Ruby On Rails in just amazingly natural to work with? It takes me back to my old ZX Spectrum programming days, when programming was more of an art than an engineering task.

technorati tags: bibli.ca, creative writing, updates, guy tavor, short stories, essays, poems, novels,

9:28 AM | Permalink |

Minor changes

Monday, December 19, 2005

Homepage navigation was changed, thanks to Bill's and Brian's input.

Homepage is much wider now.

Each user have her own "description" that show whenever others are seeing that user's profile. You can change your description (and buddy icon) by logging in, clicking on "your settings".