PhysicsDiet Status Blog

This blog has moved

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 10:50:05 -0600

I’m moving the blog back over to blog.physicsdiet.com. Go there for the latest news.

Export is working again!

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 09:14:00 -0500

I was able to get the Fitness Log Export working. You may want to regularly export your data just in case the site crashes again before I can get it moved somewhere more reliable.

I tried to get a working development environment setup so I can try to address some of the other issues, but unfortunately it doesn’t look like I’m going to have much luck with that. At this point I’m going to cut my losses on the existing .NET codebase and focus on moving the site to a platform I can support for the future.

Your feedback is welcome

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 15:20:16 -0500

I created a uservoice site for PhysicsDiet.com.

Looking for a new home for PhysicsDiet.com

Tue, 03 Aug 2010 14:01:41 -0500

As you guys are probably painful aware, the site is still not working quite right. I am going to try to resolve these errors, but it will take me a few days since I don’t use Windows or .NET anymore. So first I have to get a test environment set up.

I’m also looking for a new home for PhysicsDiet.com. That will be a longer term effort though. And I am not confident I will find a good alternative for .NET hosting since PhysicsDiet.com also uses Microsoft SQL Server. The database is currently 1.7GB and most .NET shared hosts limit the size of MS SQL Server databases to much smaller than that.

My current long term plan is to rewrite PhysicsDiet.com so it uses a standard OSS stack so I have better hosting options. I actually started working on that a few months ago just so I could play with Rails 3. But it will be a while before I have the spare time to tackle that. Right now I’m in the business time of year for my real job. Things should slow down by September and I’ll start playing with it then.

My immediate focus will be on setting up a test environment in the next few days so I can try to get the current problems fixed. These are the problems I plan to fix ASAP:

You can’t save the profile page. This is related to a problem with the way .NET handles resources and the new environment is conflicting with one of the libraries I used for PD.
You can’t export the fitness log. I’m not sure what is causing this.

I’ll test the rest of the app to make sure there aren’t any other major problems outstanding.

I probably won’t worry about getting the old blog fixed since I haven’t updated it in ages. And the forums aren’t compatible with the new infrastructure that webhost4life is using so they won’t be back until at least I find a new home. And they may not come back then. I’ll see what I can do. But I may just replace the damn things with a Facebook page or something else like a Ning site.

I’m all ears if you have any suggestions. I may even open source the new Rails version of PhysicsDiet.com once I get it done. I was looking for a free community feature request/support site but I’m not having much luck finding anything. If I do open source the new version I’ll probably just use GitHub’s issue tracking and wiki features. Feel free to contact me on twitter. I also created a Facebook page for PD.

I spoke too soon

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 22:55:37 -0500

It looks like I was wrong. The database that webhost4life found is the database that has been running for the last few days. And it is missing more than two months of data. I think that is as good as they are going to do at this point.

If your account was created since May, you probably can’t log in. Lots of you have emailed me, unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to reply to you. I hope tomorrow I will be able to reply to those of you who have emailed me.

I am truly sorry this has happened. It was one of my worst fears for the site. The site doesn’t make much money, but that wasn’t why I kept it running all these years. I know many of you have use the site and depend on it, and I wanted to keep it running for you.

I know several features are still broken. I hope I can find a solution for those problems soon. Once I’ve solved the problems that I can, I’ll turn my attention to finding a better home for PhysicsDiet.com. When I first created PhysicsDiet.com, webhost4life was pretty dependable, and they had great customer support. That obviously isn’t true anymore.

Several of you have emailed me with offers to help with hosting. I appreciate that. I haven’t had a chance to think much about what comes next, but I will get back to you all.

I also want to thank those of you who have donated money. I appreciate the support.

Export is not working

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 06:45:38 -0500

It looks like the export is not working right now. I’ll see if I can get that fixed soon. But first I want to get a copy of the database.

Data found!

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 06:38:24 -0500

It looks like webhost4life was able to find the current database on the old server. The data for the last 2 months or so should be there. However, anything you entered over the last few days is now missing. I hope that’s much less of a problem for everyone.

I’m going to grab an off-site backup of the data ASAP. If you want a backup of your own data, you should be able to export your fitness log entries to CSV.

If your account is locked, please send an email to administrator at physicsdiet dot com and I will get it unlocked for you as quick as I can.

Now I just need to find a new host for PD so this sort of thing doesn’t happen again.

No news...

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 21:20:40 -0500

…Is probably not good news in this case. I still haven’t heard back from webhost4life. I assume that means they won’t have a newer copy of the database. I will post an update as soon as I hear from them.

Webhost4Life

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 10:28:30 -0500

Apparently I’m not the only one furious with webhost4life. And this doesn’t inspire confidence.

PhysicsDiet.com Data Loss

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:16:00 -0500

If you are reading this, then you already know that something went terribly wrong with PhysicsDiet.com this week. Yesterday I received an email that the site was down. I immediately contacted the host for the site, webhost4life. Apparently they moved the site from one set of servers to a new set of servers without notifying me.

They claim this happened on June 9, 2010, but that is obviously bullshit since the site worked fine until yesterday. They also claim that a technical glitch caused the email they normally send after the migration to not be sent to me at all.

The site is back up and appears to be working except they’ve also lost 2 months worth of data. I haven’t yet heard an excuse from them why the data is missing, and I don’t know if they have any more recent backups.

I’m sorry the site was down yesterday and I’m sorry that two months worth of data may be permanently missing. I’ll do what I can to get the data restored, but I don’t have any external backups, so there may not be much I can do.

I knew there was a risk of losing data since I had no off-site backups. But the site barely covers its costs so I could not justify moving the site to a more expensive provider.

Unfortunately I chose ASP.NET as the platform for the site when I first developed it. Web hosting for ASP.NET is pretty sketchy to begin with, and because you never get full access to your servers when you use ASP.NET for a hosted site, it is almost impossible to automate off-site backups in a cost effective way.

I’ll update this site when I know more. You can also follow me on Twitter.