Gandi IWI Blog - Gandi Blog

GandiBlogs updated

Ryan — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 09:02:00 +0200

As you surely know, GandiBlog is based on the DotClear blog engine. During our recent maintenance operation on the platform, we benefited from the opportunity to shine it up a little. In short, we have upgraded from version 2.0.2 to 2.1.5.

This upgrade does not contain any major overhauls, though you will nonetheless see subcategories, which many of you have been requesting. Also, among the changes are a new video media (vimeo.com), the support of Flash 10, many new video options, as well as a plethora of minor corrections...

You are now armed with the latest blogging technology...have fun!

GandiBlog update!

Ryan — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:22:00 +0200

Hello,

We are in the process of updating the GandiBlog platform to run on the Dotclear 2.02 system (we were previously running on 2.0). This maintenance will also improve our caching system and will solve the issue of blank pages appearing that some of you might have seen when publishing a new entry.

The updates will mainly affect the import/export features which allow you to import a blog from a flat file, or export your dotclear blog to a flat file to take away.

Please let us know if you have any problems following this update.

The technical team

A free T-Shirt with your order !

Ryan — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:05:00 +0200

"The brisk Western breeze pelting my face with the spray from the sea as I defiantly maintain our course through the waves. My eyes finally forced closed for just a moment, I must stop and submit to the sensations of life. The night time sun painting the sea a secretive violet and gold. The feeling of total freedom that comes with the beginning of the summer vacation, and the voyage towards a place of serenity, or is that an island..."

Yeah, well - vacation is over for me now...

You too? I guess we're in the same boat then. What? Like me, you feel like a writer and want to share tales about your vacation?

The opportunity could not be better, so let me remind you about DotClear, the motor that drives the GandiBlogs! The majority of you are already familiar with this, some of you even have an active blog on one of your Gandi-registered domains. Well, DotClear, which really is well known around the world, has been updated. DotClear 2 is now available, and is already running the GandiBlogs.

Surely you are aware that Gandi provides you with a free blog with every domain name purchase?

Take a .info for example. If you buy one today, which cost €6 for 12 months, you will be able to have a blog for the whole year.

So what are you waiting for! This is a rare opportunity for you to share your summer adventures with all your friends, with a personalized domain name. And while you are at it, why not insert your favorite photos, a video of the fish that got away, or of a UFO seen hovering over the bay...

And why not look good when classes start in September? I will send a free Gandi t-shirt to your mailbox, all you need is an order made with us for a total of €50 or more in new domain name registrations or transfers at Gandi beginning on August 1st while stocks last!

I just need to add that this t-shirt offer is only available to addresses in mainland France and its neighbors: Great Britain, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Italy and Spain

If you meet the above criteria and are eligible for this offer, you can claim your t-shirt by sending me an e-mail at tshirt@gandi.net with the following information:

your transaction order number (one that is at least €50 and related to the registration or transfer of domain names at Gandi),
your Gandi handle,
your first and last name,
the size that you would like (the specific design depends on what stocks we have left),
your shipping address

And me, I will be spending the remaining days of August mailing off your T-shirts

"The recycled air from the air conditioner blowing right in my face. My eyes closed as I sneeze from the dust stirred up from the bottom of the t-shirt box. The flaming pink color of the XL T-shirt of...what's her name again?...as I fold it and slip it into the envelope. The florescent white lights beating me into submission while sitting on the floor..."

Gandiblog Incident

Ryan — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:34:00 +0200

We have been encountering serious performance problems with GandiBlog over the past few days, and you have unfortunately felt the full consequences of this. Please accept our sincere apologies.

What is happening

Since the opening of GandiBlog two years ago, many of you have created one or more blogs. At the beginning, everything went well as there was not too much data. Then, with time, comments started to be added to your blogs (this is not a bad thing, but it is at the origin of the problem as you will soon see). It turns out that around 90% of these comments are spam. We began to be aware of the problem last summer and performed several "cleaning operations" to remove spam from the blog comments. We believed that everything was going well, all the more so as we put into place a high-performance cache system. Wrong!

During the deletion of the spam, we did not take into account the comments that were published, but only the ones that were flagged as spam. Last night, a first wave of deletions removed 600,000 (yes, that is correct) published trackbacks.

The space occupied by the illegitimate spam led to serious performance problems for the database and therefore hurt the entire GandiBlog platform.

What we are going to do

Purge the spam

Yesterday, we therefore deleted 600,000 illegitimate trackbacks. We are continuing with this today, as there are easily 300,000 which have no business being on GandiBlog. Note, however, that we will not touch your comments in any case, this only concerns the trackbacks.

Optimization of our database

Several points remain yet to be addressed in order to improve the performance of the database. We are going to work on this in the coming days and weeks.

Display of recent comments on your blog

The widget, which allows you to display the latest comments published on your blog, now has a cache of 30 minutes. This was implemented this morning and will remain effective.

Improvement of the cache

Several significant improvements to the cache system remain to be implemented. These will be put into production this afternoon.

Closing of comments and trackbacks

We have observed that too many blogs have been abandoned with the comments left open. No comments will be published now for a blog that has not been updated for at least 2 months. It will be possible, of course, to reactivate the acceptance of comments via the administration interface of the blog.

We're working on it !

All of this will be done as soon as possible. We are even more upset than you are about the blogs not operating at an optimal level, and we would like to be able to continue to offer you new options. This will be the case, once the blogs are running, are rapid, and in a way that is stable.

If you would like to comment on this topic, please feel free to visit the Gandi Bar

Gandi Blog maintenance

Ryan — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 23:39:00 +0200

We are currently experiencing an overload of the Gandi Blog database.

We are in the process of fixing the problem at this very moment.

The blogs are therefore offline while we proceed with the maintenance. Please accept our apologies for these incidents.

1:20 CEST // A temporary fix has been setup -- we'll continue some maintenance works tomorrow.

Static pages and other new GandiBlog features

Ryan — Thu, 22 May 2008 18:46:00 +0200

As you may have noticed, GandiBlog has been updated. It now allows you to create static pages, and in addition to other new features, you will find that it is much more ergonomic.

Static pages

Many of you have requested the addition of what we call "static pages" that you can add that can be visited from your blog's sidebar.

We have therefore added these, and made them as easy to use as possible. The interface is therefore a 'light' version of the one used to create blog entries, and is without a only few features:

No categories
No outgoing trackbacks
No tags

We have kept some of the same features as the blog entries however:

A list of pages
A page to create or modify pages
Comments and trackbacks are possible on a page
A page can be protected by a password
One can add media to a page just like with the blog entries

Comments left on the page will be displayed in the general comments list (with an indication next to the title). Comments are also filtered by the anti-spam system.

A new theme that can be customized by default

This was brought up in the previous post concerning GandiBlog, but it is worthy of being discussed again.

This new version of GandiBlog has a new default theme called Blowup. This theme is accompanied by a plugin that allows you to easily configure it. You can therefore chose the color of the test, the links, as well as their size and font. You can also change some of the background colors (page, comments).

You will have the leisure of choosing a banner image from and if none of the eclectic choices are appealing toyou, you can use your own image.

If you are having difficulties being inspired, you may choose a predefined style or use it as the starting point of your work. Finally, you may share your styles with others by simple copy and pasting your code in your blog or in forms.

To conclude, if you do not know any CSS or want to learn all these barbaric things, this theme just what you need. I will even mention that an employee of Gandi used this theme - though I will not mention any names

Ergonomic improvements

The article composition zone has been improved, mainly with regards to the text editor. The presentation and the homogeneity of the editor on the page has been improved. The editor now has a button that allows you to generate a link to another blog entry. For example, if you would like to refer to a recent article, you can simply click on the insertion link, choose the entre from the list (using the search engine if necessary) and voilà!

The management of tags is improving. You now have the ability to delete a tag: either for all the blog entries that use it, or just a couple.

A list of tags that exist at the time you are writing a new entry is now available, just as when you are modifying an existing entry.

You will also notice that you may now export all or part of your media manager to a zip file. This was made available during the previous update, I simply forgot to mention it.

New online help

The presentation of the contextualized help has been totally revisited. The little nearly invisible question marks have been replaced by a very clear button on the upper-right corner of each page that has a special help section. Clicking on the button will display the help contents (and another click will hide it). The help information will be displayd right over the content: this is unfortunately not a bug, but a limitation of a web browser whose name I will withhold.

Performance and spam

GandiBlog has seen a diverse range of performance problems for various reasons. The main one is the constant flooding of the database with comment spam. A new filter was put in place that will verify the origin if the trackbacks. The data that we have receiving shows that this works very well and blocks a large majority of the trackback spam (which represents nearly all of the comment spam).

Note that as of now, we systematically delete all spam that is is older than 7 days.

Many of you now use, or have tried out GandiBlog. This success therefore means that we need to continue developing our platform. The network team is looking at all the various solutions that can be implemented in order to improve GandiBlog performance even more.

If you would like to discuss this with us, please feel free to visit the Gandi Bar!

Blog widgets (updated)

Kalou — Sun, 04 May 2008 19:53:00 +0200

We had to suspend some blog widgets in order to recover from high latencies you might have encountered on your Gandiblog this week-end.

We are working on the problem and expect a resolution on monday.

Updated Mon May 5 17:17:43 CEST: service is back online since a few hours and should be stable.

Presents for a bit of colour

Arti — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 12:02:00 +0100

As we announced yesterday, GandiBlog now has a new theme called "Blowup" which allows you to customise many presentation aspects.

Furthermore, this theme proposes a module which allows you to copy the code of a defined style. This allows users to share their customised styles with other users. The "Blowup" theme also offers some pre-defined styles, but there are only few for the time being.

We're going to add more in days to come and thought you could help out as well. To do so, nothing simpler: configure your Blowup theme until you're happy with the result. Once you've done so, click the "+" by "Import / export" and copy the code in the text field which comes up. Then, you can just paste it right here as a comment (and give it a name if you feel inspired).

If you lack inspiration, visit Kuler http://kuler.adobe.com/.

The authors of the styles we will choose to add to the list of pre-defined styles will be given a Gandi t-shirt or a one-year domain renewal, as a token of our gratitude.

What is more, those who feel really inspired can design header images. Only one condition: These must be 800 pixels in width. PNG transparency is allowed (and encouraged). Leave the image's URL as a comment.

Note: Gandi personnel are allowed to participate, but won't get any presents...

Happy colouring to all

To play, join us here!

GandiBlog Update: The Return

Ryan — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:59:00 +0100

You may have noticed your GandiBlog running faster this afternoon.

No, we haven't added 50 new machines, we've just updated GandiBlog. In fact, we've doubly updated it.

Your blogs definitely respond faster. We've set up a very efficient cache system on your blogs' public section, therefore avoiding avid RSS-feed-upaters penalizing everyone else. If you happen to witness any cache-related problem (pages that no longer updates, for instance), please let us know.

That's for the performance side of things.

And because good news always comes in twos, the curious among you will have noticed a new theme in the last of GandiBlog's available themes: "Blowup". Note that the screenshot in the list of themes is only one possibility.

Activate the theme and then click its configuration link. Would you like to change the background color? the title font? change the banner's position? All of those are possible with this theme.

You'll even be able to place an image in JPG or PNG format (800 pixels wide, imperatively) so as to completely personalize the top banner of your blog.

And if you lack inspiration, you'll be able to chose from a list pre-defined styles and ready-made images. There are only few for the time time being, but we're going to add some more and are also relying on your help. That will be the topic of the next post.

Recently, a reader wrote: "...you need to be a real expert in CSS and the like... Isn't there something between the 2? It would be really great to be able to choose a basic theme and simply change the photo...". I think that the Blowup theme will satisfy this need.

If you would like to discuss this article, join us at the Gandi Bar!