Urban Yukon BlogUrban Yukon news and announcements

Jackie Irvine, a member of Urban Yukon for almost a year now, has somehow managed to paint 100 landscape paintings in 100 days. I can’t even manage to brush my teeth for seven days in a row.

Congratulations, from everyone here at Urban Yukon. Enjoy your well-deserved rest… or are you going to try for 200?

I went through our member list this morning and disabled any of the blogs that didn’t seem to exist anymore. There were only about five of those, out of about 110 active blogs. Membership can be reinstated with a single click if I made a mistake.

There aren’t really any rules or guidelines for Urban Yukon membership — other than my workaday whims — so even if you wrote one single post back in ’08 and it still lives on the ‘net, then you, sir or ma’am, are a member. The same goes for bloggers who started off in the Yukon, but have since vamoosed. You never know, the dormant blogger may one day write again, and the Outsider may one day return to our Skookum Triangle.

Of course, if you would like your blog removed from Urban Yukon, for whatever reason, just send a quick note to urbanyukon-STRUDEL-yukondude-FULLSTOP-com and I’ll oblige.

You can read it here, and of course also in the print edition. Now I need to get cracking on the companion article about blogging in general. I’ve already received a number of suggestions from UY members, but if you have more, please pass ‘em along.

I first want to thank everyone that took the time to tell me what they thought of Urban Yukon and how it may have affected their blogging.

I’ve submitted the article, which will be called something like “Yukon Bloggers Unite!” Apparently, my suggestion, “Yadda Yadda Yadda Blog Blog Blog”, wasn’t deemed sufficiently specific. I think it will appear in the January 20th issue.

I did quote a few of you in the piece, but I didn’t have space to mention everyone. Fortunately, I may get a second chance by writing another general blogging article for a future issue.

Just visit this blog using your favourite mobile thingamajig. Unfortunately, the main site remains decidedly mobile-unfriendly, but there’ll be a fix for that eventually:

The service that provides the Urban Yukon feed is “experiencing technical difficulties” at the moment, so the home page is blank. I have no idea when it will be up and running again, so in the meantime, Happy New Year to all Yukon bloggers!

Update, December 31st

The service seems to be back, but occasionally it lists completely random non-Urban Yukon postings under the name of our own bloggers. I checked with them, and the same problem is affecting other service subscribers, so hopefully they’ll have that fixed soon.

It was touch and go last Saturday while Urban Yukon’s server was offline for more than 24 hours as I wrestled with the server setup. The problem seems to have been solved and it looks like smooth sailing ahead. For the three-sevenths of one percent of you that care, here’s a snapshot of the “dashboard” I use to keep tabs on the server:

Looks fascinating, no? On the left are htop and iftop which monitor the processor/memory use, and network traffic, respectively. On the right are the Apache web server access and error logs (the latter seems to be telling me to check a couple of UY blog RSS feed addresses).

I still have some fine-tuning to do on the Apache and MySQL (database) configuration so that they can’t completely take over the server during busy periods. Just a day in the life of a shade tree web server administrator.