Just passing through.

Making sure JoeUsers MetaWeblog API still works for Blog Navigator.

http://www.stardock.com/products/blognavigator/

Lets see how many watch emails this generates nows.  Hopefully only one.

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The Stardock Forums have just received a complete redesign.  If you are not reading this post via forums.stardock.com then click here to view the new layout.

We have listened to the voices of our users and customers and have taken great strides to improve our forums.  For those of you who are used to other bulletin board systems you will find that our new layout is modeled a little more closely to other forum software programs available which will make navigation more...

Today I created a caching component that allows me to save portions of the website in memory for a period of time.  The first area I have chosen to test with my caching component is to cache the right bar data.. 

When viewing the page for the first time the data is loaded from the database (like normal) but then is inserted into cache for a period of 2 minutes.  So for the next two minutes when anyone views your blog your rightbar data will be pulled from cache instead of the ...

After a very long absence of doing any work on JoeUser I am turning my attention to JoeUser for the next few days to give it some very much needed tender loving care.  I started working on some code optimization in an effort to help speed up the site.  I have already implemented several changes that should help improve JU's peformance.  And I will continue to to do more updates over the next several days.

However, I'm only working on code optimization and I am not doing any new...

Not too many people know about this but if you are looking for a bit different view of JoeUser's home page try this link:

http://www.joeuser.com/default.asp

Ok, we have identified a problem with one of scripts that was timing out.  Because of this timout issue not everyones daily points were being saved to the archive (which is where the stats are read from).  The script has been changed and should run properly tonight at its schedule time. 

So shortly after midnight we should see the points come back to life.  However, there most likely will be a side effect.  For those peoples who stats have not been archived they will...

Last week we implemented some new code that helped speed up queries in the forums (ie the Chatroom Marathon thread).  This appears to also have helped the stability of our sites a bit by reducing server load against our database.  Having our servers go all last weekend without any major problems felt really good as that has not happened in some time.  I think we are finally starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel!

Moving on to what I managed to accomplish this w...

I recently added a new server to our system the other day and it was configured with Microsoft Windows 2003 server.  When I put my ASP.Net website onto this new server I started having all sorts of problems with the image upload code.  Specifically, I could not delete a file that was uploaded. I kept getting an "Access to the path is denied" error.

I went through all the standard checks making sure that the ASPNet and IUSR_MACHINENAME accounts had full access to the folder where the...

We have been slowly migrating our servers to a new facility.  We started back a month or so by moving our database from California to Chicago.  However, because we were not able to install all our new servers in the Chicago facility we had to leave the JoeUser website back in California. 

So this means JoeUser had to go to Chicago to get its data which made things a bit slower than they should be. Well, with our server migration that took place yesterday, I finally have a new ...

Sometime after 11am EST (GMT-5) on Monday, March 21st, almost all the Stardock websites are going to go dark for a couple of hours as we migrate servers from a half-rack to a full-rack in our colo facility.

It will be done as quickly as humanly possible, but things will probably be wonky into the afternoon. Stardock.com, WinCustomize.com, JoeUser.com, GalCiv2.com, the store, irc server, Stardock Central downloads, most everything will be impacted by this. I may migrate the IRC server to anot...

If you haven't noticed yet, the JoeUser forums has changed a bit.  Over at WinCustomize for the last half  year we have been coverting the site over from ASP to ASP.Net.  By doing this we are able to use many of the features in ASP.Net which help improve performance.   We have just taken the first step in bringing this updated technology over to JoeUser via the forums.   Hopefully the first thing you should notice is a speed improvement.  The .net code tak...

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Once upon a time I was going to put up a tutorial section on WinCust.  MikeB was going to round up some tutorials for me.  But because we both were busy we never finished the project.  So lets if we can get further this time.  If you have tutorials you would like to include on WinCust, please post them here.  Or if you would prefer that we just link to your tutorial then please provide us with the link.  Even if you did not write a tutorial and know of some please p...