Tuxmachines is now forced to halt the submission of anonymous news/links at least for a while. I think some new kind of bot is filling up the queue with numerous submissions of various spam. I apologize to the legitimate contributors.

My apologizes for the downtime this afternoon, but the electricity went off and stayed off for approximately 3 hours.

Well, just a short sweet post. That other server was finally brought back online at 8:pm my time after being down since 3:ish am. That's almost 17 hours. They did not answer my email this time, but the first time it happened, they answered my email within 90 minutes and had the site back up shortly after that.

I took the opportunity to test upgrading drupal to 4.7 then 4.7.1 and it was much easier than the upgrade from 4.5.8 to 4.6.6 (now 4.6.7). So you know what that means! Yep, I'm gonna be bring tuxmachines down sometime in the near future, probably tonight whiles traffic is low, and do the upgrade. It really didn't take long to get the basic functionality back, so we won't be down long.

Well, despite my hesitation, it looks like moving to a new host from my home based server might be a good idea. I received less than a 100 votes, but most said it was somewhat to quite a bit faster with a few stating about the same. No one reports slower response time.

If you've noticed the lack of reviews and slower than usual performance of tuxmachines, there is a good reason. I'm working on an off-site hosting vps in hopes of moving tuxmachines to a faster server and/or larger pipe.

Well, we have the site updated to 4.6.6. It was rough, but we are just about there. I was planning to upgrade to 4.7.x as soon as the modules and bug fixes caught up a little better, but as rough as upgrading Drupal is, it might be a bit longer.

The site was down in the early part of this morning due to maintenance/system software upgrades. It will go down again tonight at approximately the same time and for about the same length of time as I attempt to upgrade the cms.

February 4th was Tuxmachines official one year anniversary. Although I put a site up and added content 6 months prior, it was static and unknown. A year ago I began putting a little content in this little cms called Drupal and we've been growing every since. Tuxmachines continued to showed some growth early part of the quarter, but perhaps has now leveled off some.

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Well, another 3 months has gone by bringing my official time online to 9 months. Boy how time flies. The big news this quarter was the hardware upgrade. I wonder if anyone noticed the site performing a bit better. We're still limited by my bellsouth business dsl pipe, but the server is functioning much snappier now.

This second quarter has been very exciting for me. The hits have continued to grow each month and we've had some great community contributions in the forms of articles and comments. Meanies still plague the site, but I've had a wonderful time reviewing distros and posting news links.

Sorry for the downtime, it's been a rough day. Not only was my Symphony story getting a lot of play, but I was also the subject of ddos attacks on the site and my mail server. It seems to have subsided some now, and I'm back up. I do apologize.

Today marks the anniversary of my first quarter year actually getting hits. I started a little website last July actually, but I started getting some reads when I installed drupal then began posting a few links to stories on Feb. 04 and finally posted my first original article on Feb. 08.

We have since grown to over 100,000 hits last month. I hope to continue to grow as I learn what the audience wants to read. My hopes also include promoting Linux and helping the world see the advantages of oss while having lots of fun in the process. Because to me, that's the biggest advantage of running Linux - it's just plain fun.

Just wanted to post a big THANK YOU to jrangels for donating his time and wonderful talent to make us a great new logo and header background image here at tuxmachines.org. You might know his work from being offered on kde-look.org or from being the primary graphic artist for pclinuxos. His newest work for that distro is on display in the tuxgallery. Mosey on by and take a look before you leave.

Thanks again Jose.

I can only apologize for the slowness and inaccessibility of the site past coupla days and that one other occurrence last month I guess it was. I was /.'d last month and osnews'd yesterday (continuing today). I can't really do much about it right now. I subscribe to bellsouth's largest business pipe in our area, but it's still quite limited upstream. The only way I can think of to alleviate this condition is to perhaps consider off-site hosting. I don't really want to do this for several reasons, but the main one is the financial considerations. Fortunately (or unfortunately - depending upon how you look at it) this only happens once in a while, so I guess I'll (we'll?) have to just live with it for now. If this issue continues to come up, I'll look at my alternatives more closely.

Some folks have joked that my site had been taken down, and for now this hasn't been true. As my logs will testify, my server continued to function at all times, saddly I ran out of pipe. I have a fair amount of confidence in apache (and drupal) to handle large loads and hopefully we won't have to deal with that issue.

Anyway, all that to say, thanks so much for visiting my little corner of the web. It's gratifying to receive so many hits on my original work, yet it's kinda a double-edge blade, and you, the visitor, bear the brunt. I'm sorry I don't have the bandwidth to handle those large loads so no one is denied access or their visit is painfully slow. I can't thank you enough for visiting and your comments. And of course, special thanks to pclinuxonline, Slashdot, osnews, userlocal and all the others for carrying my stories.

Thank you sincerely,
Susan

I do apologize for the missing pclinuxonline news feed. Seems there is a story with a bad character in it causing a little problem for drupal to pull in. It should be cleared up and return to the news block in a few days when that story rotates out of the feed. Didn't want anyone to think I removed my best supporter from my site. No way, no how, na uh.

Just my luck too, right when I got a story they were kind enough to carry.