Urban Yukon BlogUrban Yukon news and announcements

If you had checked into Urban Yukon between about 10am on Friday the 3rd and 11am on Saturday the 4th, you would’ve either seen an apologetic message or nothing whatsoever. The reason was that I was upgrading the server that hosts urbanyukon.com and the procedure became discombobulatingly defusticated for some bizarre reason.

I had good backups, so nothing was lost, but it will take a little while for the site to catch up with your most recent blog postings.

The server is also now upgraded to the most recent version of the Ubuntu Server operating system and has more memory to boot, so Urban Yukon should run much more smoothly.

I’m updating the server’s operating system and it’ll take a few hours to complete. I’ll post an update later this afternoon with news of my progress.

“Into the Hot Zone” has been stuck at the top of the posts for a few days now. I’ve asked the folks at UpHere to have a look at it from their end. It seems that it has a publish date in the future, and the service we use to collect the posts sorts rather naively using that date. Hopefully we’ll have that sorted out soon so that it occupies its correct position.

Update

With help from UpHere, it’s fixed.

…and because of that, you probably won’t see this post, unless you’re one of the very, very few that subscribes to the Urban Yukon Blog itself.

The list of posting on the Urban Yukon home page is supplied by the Feed Informer service, and they’re monkeying with the internals at the moment.

Update: as of sometime in the afternoon on April 17, it started working again.

Over the past couple of weeks, eight new members have joined Urban Yukon.

Spread the good word about Urban Yukon with one of these nifty badges.

It’s true that I was responsible for some of the rush by missing a number of requests to join made during the beginning of the year, but I just stumbled upon the other blogs by chance. Few, if any, of these new members were previously aware of Urban Yukon, but they did seem to follow other Yukoners’ blogs and so it stands to reason that we could boost our membership if each of us were to promote Urban Yukon on our blogs.

The Urban Yukon site already has instructions for adding a badge like the example on the right to your blog, but I’ve added some more detailed instructions for folks using WordPress or Blogger/Blogspot below. If you use a different system, or need a bit of extra help, just let me know: urbanyukon swirl-above-number-2 yukondude speck-below-greater-than com.

WordPress

1. Choose Widgets from the Appearance menu on the left-hand side of the administration screen.
2. Use the mouse to drag the Text widget from the Available Widgets box to the Sidebar 1 box.
3. You can add a title if you like, but it’s not necessary. Paste the HTML code for your preferred badge from the Urban Yukon Learn More page into the large empty field below the title. Leave the Automatically add paragraphs checkbox unchecked. Click the Save button.
4. You can drag the sidebar widgets around to change the order in which they’ll be displayed.
5. Relax by the fire with a fine snifter of brandy and a Tonino Jacono.

Blogger/Blogspot

1. Choose Layout from the Dashboard page.
2. Click Add a Gadget from the sidebar area of your layout and then choose HTML/JavaScript.
3. You can add a title if you like, but it’s not necessary. Paste the HTML code for your preferred badge from the Urban Yukon Learn More page into the Content field. Click the Save button.
4. You can drag the sidebar gadgets around to the change the order in which they’ll be displayed. Click the Save button once you’re done.
5. Relax by the pool with a salted margarita and a Vegas Robaina Familiar.

So, very, very sorry, but requests to join Urban Yukon have been forwarded to a dormant e-mail account for the past few months. I’ve found the e-mail messages and am now contacting all the folks that tried to join during that time. I’ve confirmed that the form on the Join page now sends to the proper address: urbanyukon-strudel-yukondude-fullstop-com (no spammer can see through that inscrutable obfuscation!).

Once again, I apologize to the Urban Yukon community. Hopefully we’ll see some new blogs join our merry band soon.

If you’ve checked the UY site in the past couple of days, it will appear that some postings are stuck on the front page, even though they predate earlier posts from other blogs. In at least one case, it seems that the RSS feed is erroneously showing today’s date for all of its postings, and the Feed Informer service that provides the content of the front page is believing those dates (as it must).

Because the glitch seems to be originating from other blogs via Feed Informer, I don’t have a ready solution at the moment. Suggestions are welcome, although I’m down in sunny Toronto for the foreseeable future and not completely or reliably internet-connected. So, I’m hopeful that the problem will “just go away on its own” over the next couple of days.

Update Jan 28th

Looks like this may be solved. A slightly different URL for the problem blogs’ feeds seems to have done the trick.

Urban Yukon was trundling along fine this morning, but I couldn’t get to the site at about 10pm this evening. Turns out the database on the server went completely wackadoo and froze everything tight. I restarted it and everything is fine again. The server has been running straight for 476 days without a reboot, and this is only the second time that the database (MySQL, if you must know) has kerplonked in all that time.

If you do happen to see that Urban Yukon is down, please send a note to urbanyukon strudel yukondude fullstop com, or just call: I’m listed in both Yukon directories (i.e., the NorthwesTel one, and that other advertising one that seems to show up from time to time).

It’s not just you. I’ve noticed the same for a while, and recently Urban Yukon has become positively sluggish in listing new posts, sometimes taking many hours before updating.

I don’t have any hard numbers, but if there is a slowdown, it’s likely due to the Feed Informer service that provides the list of postings on UY’s home page. Feed Informer has been mostly reliable, but occasionally hiccups and displays nothing at all on the UY page. (When that happens, try refreshing your browser.) Of course, for the price of exactly zero clams, I have no real complaints with the service.

But Feed Informer’s days are numbered anyway, as I have to replace it with custom code to enable the promised new features. My goal is to make the transition as seamless as possible, with no interruptions to the flow of postings. Once the new platform is in place, I expect to have a method to pick up new posts the instant that they are published.

Urban Yukon postings have been on a tear lately. I don’t have exact numbers, but we seem to be averaging at least twenty new posts per day. Our dark season likely has something to do with the prolific outpourings.

We also have a few new members. I’ll be welcoming them here shortly. Please visit and comment; both new and established bloggers appreciate — and secretly crave — feedback.

At least a couple of UY blogs have been nominated for the Canadian Blog Awards. Please vote for your favourite personal or family blogs (hint: “possessive” blogs that start with F or M). Results will be posted on December 12th.

It’s taken me a while to figure out how best to add the most requested features from the recent UY poll. In short, there will be some programming involved, but that’s fine by me. The features that I’ll tackle first will be:

• Gather together multiple recent posts by a single author so that they don’t crowd out other postings.
• Ability to view older blog postings than just those shown on the front page.
• Search that can find matches in posting contents.
• Categories for member blogs (e.g., business, techie, family, news).
• “Identicons” alongside postings to highlight the author

The first three have become ever more important, what with the growth in posting frequency of late.

I’ll be introducing the changes gradually, at a different URL so that interested folks can try them out before the changes are promoted to the “live” site. I also think that most of us appreciate the basic way that Geof organized UY, and I don’t want to mess with that successful formula.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome.