Heapin' Helpin' Of Slashdot Notes

A truckload of you have emailed to curse me because you aren't getting emails from the system for lost passwords and new accounts. I'm getting emails from some of my accounts, but not from others, so hopefully I can get this working soon. Probably just switch to Net::SMTP. But wait, thats not all. Hit the link for a big batch of assorted updates pertaining to bug fixes, hardware updates, and new features coming up on Slashdot. Its fun for the whole family assuming your whole family is deranged. Update: 03/10 11:34 by CT : I think email is working again. Hopefully everyone can stop emailing me now *grin*. Update: 03/10 11:55 by CT : The Users Page has been updated- click 'Preferences' to get the first round of Slashdot customization. More hopefully in the next day or 2.

Customizable Homepages
Yes thats right, you'll be able to filter on Topic, Author & Section. So if you only want to read Jon Katz articles, or really only like Star Wars stories or something, you'll be able to do that. The real wild card is how much server strain this is going to cause. I'm hoping that this will go live tomorrow (or maybe even later tonight if I can fix some stuff).

Even cooler is a coming-rsn feature- ya know the big grey boxes on the right hand side of the homepage? Those will soon be customizable. If anyone has good suggestions for sites to import, let us know. We've done a few sites already (freshmeat obviously, Everything is coming soon). But this will allow you to ignore features, or polls or book reviews entirely, and hopefully provide headlines to a few other sites if you're interested. There also is a user defined box so you can stick bookmarks or something if you want. I've been testing it all day with a link to the Jennicam and GNOME.org and it all seems to be working. We'll probably have that publicly usable by the end of the week. And I have a box with a picture of Dust Puppy for no apparent reason. Its neat.

Hardware
The new hardware is holding up fine. Its load is easily half that of the old box. We'll see how the new dynamic homepage affects this. I think we'll be ok, but if everyone uses the new features, we're gonna need to start load balancing. A dedicated SQL box, and a few load balancing web servers will probably let us handle significant growth, but for now, I'd rather concentrate on just providing all the features I want with the number of hits we're getting. Once I have to start messing with load balancing and massive scalability, I'll have even less time to add actual usability enhancements to the site.

Email
Ya, it seems to be busted. I'm working on it. Its a major pain because nobody can get forgotten passwords, and new users aren't able to login at all. Its my #1 priority right now. It might just be me now tho, but I think its working. I get email at 1 of my accounts, but not 2 of the others. Hopefully I'll figure it out soon.

Source Release
v0.3 is basically done. Unfortunately Slashdot itself has forked well beyond v0.3. I'm probably gonna release v0.3 anyway. Slashdot is getting so customized for slashdot that its more work to make a clean version of the code for distribution than I care to think about. So much of the code is stuff specifically designed for things we need here, but nobody else would need. The stuff that would be applicable to another site is in the v0.3 tarball (many of you have prereleases already). But I'll probably just bite the bullet and throw it out there in the next couple weeks. My time to work on it has gone from minimal to non-existant.

The FTP server is still down. I'm not really planning on putting it back up. The code is downloadable from this directory if you are dying to get it.

New Moderation Stuff
A lot of people had great ideas about how to improve Slashdot moderation. The new beefy server makes it possible for me to consider implementing some of them. We'll see how much juice the current feature roster sucks up- if we've got cycles to spare, I'll try the new stuff out. It'll be optional for people who like the old system, but I think the new system will be a welcome change. More on that later, but I'm really excited about it. I think that this system will provide the best compromise that will allow anyone to say what they want, and anyone to read what they want. But first I gotta finish that homepage crap.