Progress! in Site Updates (Josh)

Hey everyone, happy Friday!

I hope Summer has been treating all of you well. IT’S HOT OMG.

Wanted to give you all an update on how things are going behind the scenes. We’ve been busy! Appreciate everyone’s patience with the occasional panda (or the new Mochi maintenance screen I cooked up). Hoping that we’ll be moving past that very soon.

Here’s where we’re at as of last night:

• The staging server is alive and humming along nicely. WOO!! This includes Amazon S3, which PB uses for hosting avatars and for the diary export functionality. That was a large chunk of work for sure, but our developer has been knocking it out of the park.

• The server is now built on something called Docker, which I could totally geek out about but I’ll spare you. The short version is that this new architecture allows us to quickly and easily spin up a self-contained version of PB anywhere we want. So if major problems happen in the future, or the host becomes unreliable, it’s possible to quickly and automatically rebuild somewhere else. This is huge when it comes to future-proofing PB. This also makes it possible to run an accurate version of the site on a local machine, which will help speed up development and testing quite a lot. Really excited about this piece.

With all of that complex groundwork in place, the next step is:

• Updating the software packages the site is built on to modern versions. This is the big one, and the key step which will hopefully (hopefully!) solve 90% of the speed and crash issues. This is going to require a ton of testing before it’s pushed out to all of you, but with the progress so far, I think we’re sitting pretty good.

And, fingers crossed, that will wrap up the server work and PB will be back on solid footing!

It’s been a journey, but we’re getting there.

As for the rest of the site
Some of you may have noticed that there’s now code in place that prevents duplicate posting on entries, books, comments and replies. Once you click the button to post, it’ll become disabled until the page is finished loading. Hopefully this will cut down on all of the duplicates that have been showing up due to the slow speeds.

More soon! Have a great weekend.

<3,
-J

Last updated July 20, 2018