Day: July 6, 2003

Finally have implemented (half of) a feature I should have added ages ago: self-service for the Ecosystem!
On the details page of any weblog, you can now click a link which takes you to an ‘edit details’ page, from which you can change any information on the blog, or request that it be deleted entirely (good for hunting down those dreaded duplicates!)
The changes will not take effect immediately — I will still review them manually and only execute those that seem to make sense (to prevent abuse, and to avoid having to implement some gawdawful authentication system).
I still need to write the back-end that will make my ‘accept change’ work, but y’all can start combing the Ecosystem for data errors and submit change requests to your hearts’ content. If you’ve sent me such requests in email, I’d greatly appreciate it if you’d re-submit them through the interface — I’ll still try to get to them if you don’t, but it’ll probably happen later.
Thanks!
-NZB
PS: No, this doesn’t mean Hosting Matters my shell access problem — it just happened that I was able to implement this feature without shell access. The goodies that you were going to get today were much spiffier than this — but it looks like that ain’t happening.

I’ve been quite happy with Matters since I moved TTLB here a few months back. But I’m a little less impressed with them this morning: my shell access has been disabled to TTLB’s server, which means I can’t test some new Ecosystem stuff I had planned to work on today. I have a slight suspicion that HM might be getting irked at all the routines I’m running to support TTLB’s various features — but if that’s the case, an email would have been nice.
At any rate, now we’re in support-watch mode: I logged a ticket with their support site, priority High, at 6:38am PDT. It’s now six hours later, and no response at all. Not good.
I recognize Sunday is not a business day, but for me, it’s prime development time, so this is more than a bit annoying.
Updates to follow if and when I get a response…
-NZB
Update: OK, I’m back up and running as of 6:38pm. However, it seems that HM actually implemented some security changes that broke one of the Ecosystem scripts. Ironically, it broke the very piece of code that I inserted to ensure that I don’t spawn unlimited processes while doing scans — causing the test run I just executed to go berzerk and spawn about 450 subprocesses. Sure is a good thing I was watching it, else I wouldn’t have been able to fix it. I’m still waiting to hear whether I missed an announcement on this particular change…