It's official! We've a new blogging site available for the Perl community. Dave Cross has now made the announcement. I've a blog post over there explaining a few things about it. It's still alpha and there will be bugs, so keep that in mind. That being said, play around and have fun.
The forms are placed so that it looks ugly and they have no labeling.
I made a test comment and previewed. That error message sucks. Then I went over to Dave's blog to write this report and was not able to comment there, either.
Where on MAGnet can I chat with y'all to exchange more information?
Re:alpha indeed ;)
Ovid on 2009-11-20T10:14:38
You can shoot an email to Dave Cross's gmail account (davorg). A couple of other errors have cropped up, too. Believe it or not, this is far better than when it started
:) Re:alpha indeed ;)
Ovid on 2009-11-20T10:26:25
What browser and version are you using? The site looks much nicer to me.
Re:Cannot register
Ovid on 2009-11-20T10:35:59
A couple of others are getting that. It's being looked into now.
We're aware of the 500 errors that many people are getting when signing in (or out). Seems to be some kind of resource issue.
I'm looking into it. Sorry for the inconvenience.
I'm sorry, but how does one work for a year on a website but not get the login working right?
I was a bit interested in it, unlike all the previous "goodbye, cruel use Perl;" attempts, but clicking the button on the signup page I got a "can't fork page" error, then trying to login after a few tries it now says "This account has been disabled. Please see your system administrator for access.". Incredible! Maybe it's just me, but I find this to be a major turnoff...
Re:very alpha.....
davorg on 2009-11-20T21:47:23
We weren't working on it for a year. There have been a number of attempts on the project and this, most recent, version has been built in a couple of months.
We're still investigating the problem, but it seems that our error was in capacity planning. During two weeks of testing we have seen very few errors, but once the entire Perl community started looking at the site, the server couldn't cope.
Yes, it's disappointing. But I can assure you that no-one is as disappointed as me today.
I can only apologise again.
Re:very alpha.....
slanning on 2009-11-22T11:58:13
Sorry, not sure what I was thinking when I wrote that.Re:very alpha.....
Ovid on 2009-11-21T00:06:12
As Dave pointed out, the site itself is actually very new. The idea has been around for a long time, but there were some false starts which were looked at and discarded. As mentioned, the site is alpha. It worked fine, but it turned out that when plenty of people hit it, there were memory issues. Given that it's a a fresh launch of a new site built by volunteer labor who freely admit that it's alpha code, it's understandable that there will be bugs. Regrettably, the nature of bugs is that they're unknown quantities. These issues didn't show up during testing and I promise you that there were plenty of other issues which did show up during testing. Both Dave and SixApart did a fantastic job of resolving many of them. And bear in mind that once this issue is resolved, plenty of other issues will show up during testing and others are going to complain.
So a choice was made by Dave (and supported by myself and others), that since we didn't have the resources to test this as thoroughly as, say, major corporations do when launching a new product, we'd throw it out there with caveats. I'm sorry that the bugs we encountered were more severe than anticipated, but that's bugs for you. This will be resolved and blogs.perl.org will be a great alternative to use.perl, but please reserve judgment. This is a relatively new project being created with limited resources as a gift to the Perl community.
FWIW, I hit some fairly evil bugs too, but looking again after a few hours, they seem to have gone away without any real effort on my part.
So yay for attentive admins, and thank you greatly guys for your hard work.
