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.
Archive for the 'Site Announcements' Category
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.
We are currently testing the redirect coming from our old “oceanstaterepublican.com” domain.
As you may know, we’ve had some “problems” with our old site, which necessitated the disconnection of our old server and domain, the creation of the new site. If this doesn’t cause a server crash, then we’ll deem the test a success and will keep the old domain’s forwarder enabled for your convenience.
By the way, if you have us bookmarked, we strongly suggest using “oceanstaterepublican.org” instead. Also, please update your RSS or Atom feed with the new .org address. Thank you.
The “new” OSR is now largely functional, but we’re not done yet.
We are still working on some background stuff related to the ability for visitors such as yourself to leave comments. The comment preview function is currently not working properly, so just type what you want to type in the first time around and you should be okay.
While you as a human, non-robotic visitor should be able to comment on our posts, you cannot currently “register” to comment. This is actually intentional. We’re trying to see if the comment moderation software will let “unregistered” users comment, without holding their comment in the moderation queue. If it doesn’t let you post your comment immediately, don’t take it the wrong way … we still like you.
We are also in the midst of recreating the “blogroll,” so if you see any obvious omissions, it just means we haven’t gotten around to adding a particular link yet. We’ll get around to it soon enough.
The “new” OSR blog is pretty close to fully functional, so why not help us test it out a little?
[Try to] leave a comment or two. Let’s see if it treats you like a blacklisted spammer, or as an old friend. You should not have to register in order to leave a comment. Comment moderation is almost entirely automated… except when it isn’t.
Have some fun with our new super cool Ajax-powered instantaneous “live search” capability. This is something we never could have made work on our old site. On the upper-right side of the page, just “type” in something and “wait” — just like it says. Unfortunately, there still isn’t a ton of archival information to actually search through.
Sift through “older posts” … of course, right now, that means last week’s posts. In the upper-center of the page you should see the word “Older” with a few arrows. Click it and see what happens. Press “Trim” and see what it does.
We are still working on the ShareThis function at the bottom of each post. It appears to work fine with Firefox. However, with Internet Explorer, not so well. Of course, it’s almost certainly Microsoft’s fault, not ours.
Other than that, we’re still adding in things like outgoing links to other sites, and well as adding basic information about the site. Since there is still so much to do, we have to prioritize.
More to come, so stay tuned!
After approximately 4 weeks offline, we are still working on reconstructing The Ocean State Republican after a very catastrophic failure of, well, we’re still not quite sure. The important thing is: WE’RE BACK!
Please note that the primary domain of the “new” The Ocean State Republican is now at http://oceanstaterepublican.org , as opposed to at “.com” so, please update any old bookmarks for us that you may have, as well as any RSS or Atom feeds.
Thank you for your patronage. Stay tuned for more!
After approximately 4 weeks offline, we are still working on reconstructing The Ocean State Republican after a very catastrophic failure of, well, we’re still not quite sure.
Between the PHP and the MySQL, as well as sifting through the code of nearly 40 plugins, as well as digging through layers upon layers of undecipherable blather, we have managed to more or less isolate the problem, but alas are unable to directly fix it.
The problem seems to have been triggered by a server upgrade to the latest version of PHP by our hosting company. While there was obviously no malevolent intent on their part, this well-intentioned action, meant to enhance security, as well as speed, resulted in multiple fatal software conflicts, which likely had to do with the many old plugins, as well as older code which we had been running with occasional, though not serious problems, for that last several years.
As a result, although we still have a back-up of the huge archive of all previous The Ocean State Republican posts (which are stored on a MySQL database), we are unable to reintegrate it with the latest version of PHP and WordPress at this time.
However, as “every frown is just a smile turned upside down,” we are taking this — we hope unique — opportunity to bring you a “new and improved,” as well as a much more secure OSR. We hope the final product will be much more user friendly, as well as far quicker loading … among other things.
Please note that the primary domain of the “new” The Ocean State Republican is now at http://oceanstaterepublican.org , as opposed to at “.com”. This allows us to be able to access some files from the old site, as well as to continue working at reintegrating some of the content from the old site into this “new” blog in the future.
Thank you for your patronage. Stay tuned for more!
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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.