Sorry about the outage. Due to a complicated technical problem, most of the site and feed has been down for the past few days.
Archive for the 'Site Announcements' Category
The RIRA family of websites, including The Ocean State Republican, was offline for the past few days. Everything appears to be up and running again. Our apologies for any inconvenience, especially to those who were trying to register online for the Pork-u-lus Pig Roast (which can found at http://ri-ra.org/pigroast/)
The website is currently experiencing technical difficulties. The problem has been causing sporadic site outages. We think it has now been resolved. The hosting company is aware of the problem and it should be completely fixed shortly.
You may have noticed that we have not made any updates to the website for nearly a week now. We had been experiencing a serious technical problem having to do with a script error, which caused a temporary inability for us to comment and edit our posts. It appears to have finally been resolved!
Due to an ongoing problem involving memory on our host company’s server, we have been unable to regularly access the site, which has been significantly affecting our ability to add new content or to even edit existing content. Occasionally, the site’s feed or the site itself have also been down. We’re still working on resolving the issue, so please bare with us. Fortunately for us, this is late fall of 2009 and not early fall of 2010! Thanks again.
We are still experiencing sporadic high memory usage spikes, which are causing intermittent problems with our server. This site has for the most part been continuously up and running. However, our ability to add new posts on a daily basis has been occasionally affected. However, your ability to comment on our posts should not be affected.
In and of itself, higher memory usage is not a bad thing, since it means that the site is experiencing higher traffic. However, some of that traffic may not necessarily be friendly … or human. Anyway, if you notice that there are times where the site does not appear to have any new posts being added, it is probably related to that problem. We are actively working on resolving the issue with our hosting company. Thank you.
Update: Our RSS and Atom feeds are temporarily offline. We’ll work to fix that.
We are still having intermittent server memory issues, so the site may not be fully usable or may be completely down on occasion until the problem is totally fixed. Fortunately, there hasn’t been a lot of news to comment on.
On a more positive note, it looks like we are closing in on the 100,000 vistor mark!
Thank you for your patronage.
We are working on some formatting changes to the site, in order to give this newest incarnation of The Ocean State Republican a more unique look.
In addition, in order to make better use of the space on the front page, the posts have been moved over to the left side.
Everything else should still function “normally,” but may be in a different location.
One improvement that has recently been activated, is that we are now using the “AddToAny” plug-in, which allows visitors to easily share or e-mail individual blog posts, as well as to utilize social networking to share posts much more easily.
In addition, there will be a few more technical improvements coming shortly.
PS As a reminder, you no longer need to be a “registered user” to comment on posts.
The new OSR has been back up for about a week and the server still hasn’t crashed (again)!
As a reminder, just to be on the safe side — not that we’re expecting any more “problems” — we encourage our readers to simply update their Bookmarks, RSS or Atom feeds to use http://oceanstaterepublican.org, instead of our old “.com” address, just in case the redirect from the “.com” address had to terminated for security reasons.
There will be some additional testing going on this weekend, so if you see anything out of place or not working on this site, you now know why. Although this latest OSR build is significantly much more stable than what was used in the older version of The Ocean State Republican, there are still a few things behind the scenes that need to be worked out.
One of things we are going to try to do this weekend is to bring back our great dynamic CSS, JavaScript-free “drop down” menu, which allowed us to have a massive number of links on this site, contained within a relatively minuscule area. Unfortunately, that was one of the several programs that encountered a fatal conflict with the older version of WordPress used in our prior incarnation, so we have to rebuild and refine the CSS menu from scratch.
Anyway, barring a major statewide, national, or world event, we’ll see you on Monday.
Thank you.
Happy 100,000th Visitor to The OSR!
We have finally reached the 100,000 unique visitor mark! To show our thanks, please accept this authentic faux digital rendering of a $100,000 Gold Certificate as our gift to you just for visiting. You remember Gold Certificates, right? That was way back when our currency was actually backed by tangible assets, and the word “trillion” wasn’t even in our vocabularies yet. A long time ago indeed.
Thank you to everyone who has visited The Ocean State Republican — in its several incarnations — since the spring of 2008. We probably would have hit this completely arbitrary, but very round number much earlier, if it weren’t for our occasional technical glitches (and catastrophic server failures).
Once those are finally all resolved, we expect to roll out some exciting new features during the year ahead, and to make ourselves very useful during the especially crucial 2010 election cycle. Anyway, keep on visiting.
Most importantly, try to leave some comments. Remember, you do not need to be a “registered user” to comment (like on some other local blogs). Just have a somewhat realistic name and e-mail address, plus something to say relevant to the post you would like to comment on — and don’t be a spam-bot. That’s it!
Thanks, again for visiting.