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Saturday, February 23
System Maintenance 2/23/2008
February 23, 2008 07:17PM (EST)
We will be performing maintenance on our network during the following period:
During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will experience intermittent network outages. Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by the length of this maintenance window and thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider. Friday, September 14
Emergency System Maintenance 9/15/2007
September 14, 2007 08:12PM (EDT)
We will be performing emergency maintenance on our network during the following period:
As you are surely aware, we continue to experience intermittent performance degradations which affect your ability to access your blog, and many of you are experiencing difficulties accessing the control panel. Tucows, our vendor for the Blogware system upon which our service is based, performed an emergency maintenance last week to address some of the recent performance issues. However, the problems were not solved and these issue have continued. Tucows has just informed us that in response to the continued performance degradations, they will be conducting an emergency maintenance tomorrow morning Saturday Sep. 15 at 4 AM EDT (Saturday, Sep. 15, 2007 at 08:00 UTC) in order to install additional hardware. Software code adjustments will also be made on during this window which are expected to reduce the length of time required for some database queries which are slowing the system down. They have advised us that the maintenance will require approximately 6 hours.We sincerely apologize for these problems and for the inconvenience they have caused you, and will continue to work towards bringing the system back to the performance levels you previously enjoyed. Friday, September 7
Emergency System Maintenance 9/8/2007
September 7, 2007 09:18PM (EDT)
We will be performing emergency maintenance on our network during the following period:
As you are surely aware, we continue to experience intermittent performance degradations which affect your ability to access your blog, and many of you are experiencing difficulties accessing the control panel. Tucows, our vendor for the Blogware system upon which our service is based, performed an emergency maintenance window this morning to address some of the recent performance issues, and notified us that they would continue to "very closely monitor and work to improve the speed" of Blogware. Tonight, in response to the continued performance degradations, Tucows has informed us that they will be conducting an emergency maintenance window tomorrow morning Saturday Sep. 8 at 4 AM EDT (Saturday, Sep. 8, 2007 at 08:00 UTC) in order to "conduct full database maintenance to improve overall Blogware performance." They have advised us that the maintenance will require approximately 6 hours. We sincerely apologize for these problems and for the inconvenience they have caused you, and will continue to work towards bringing the system back to the performance levels you previously enjoyed. Friday, March 30
System Maintenance 4/7/2007
March 30, 2007 11:20PM (EDT)
We will be performing maintenance on our network during the following period:
During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as we upgrade our system. What is this maintenance for?
Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by the length of this maintenance window and as always, we thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider. Monday, January 29
Hosting Plans Updated
January 29, 2007 03:56PM (EST)
We're very excited to tell you about the changes we've made to our hosting plans today. We've greatly simplified our hosting plans, and added significant value by increasing capacity and reducing prices. A complete list of our plans and pricing is available here.
And Then There Were Two
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| Standard Plan | Plus Plan | |
| Disk Space | 2 GB | 10 GB |
| Bandwidth | 5 GB | 40 GB |
| Pricing | $8.95/month | $14.95/month |
Thank you for using our BlogHarbor full service hosted weblogging platform. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or feedback regarding these changes.
Recent Changes and New Features
Lots of changes and updates recently here at BlogHarbor - here's the rundown on some of the things we've been up to.
Two new items were added to the home page today at www.blogharbor.com: Fresh Posts, a list of recently posted articles and photos across all blogs, and Hot Topics, a list of recently commented on posts throughout our weblog network.
We hope you find these lists a useful–and fun–way to see what topics bloggers and readers are talking about. The lists will be updated every 5 minutes and will only include upgraded blogs, trial blogs will not appear on these lists.
Also we're happy to announce that we've deployed a search engine which allows you to search our entire network of weblogs. We used Google's Custom Search Engine service to build this feature and the results are lightning fast, timely, and precise.
Check out our list of Recently Updated BlogHarbor Weblogs and you'll be able to see at a glance which weblogs have been updated, search our blog network, or subscribe to an RSS feed listing updated blogs.
We've got a lot of support resources to help you: an extensive User Manual, a set of How To reference guides, and our Community Forums have over 5,000 posts. Sometimes it can be difficult to find an answer you're looking for because you're not sure of the best place to look for it.
Today we also implented a search engine based on Google technology which allows you to search all of our support resources at once, providing you with a great starting off point when you need help building or customizing your weblog. With just one click, you'll have access to related pages for your search term from our manuals, our How To guides, and all of the thousands of posts on our forums. Try out the new search engine from our Help page.
Our most recent System Update enhances your blog by allowing your readers to signup for a user account without leaving your blog (previously the reader account signup process led to a BlogHarbor-branded page).
Readers who are logged in will also notice that the header link in your blog which used to be labeled Subscribe is now labeled My Preferences, reflecting the fact that in addition to managing their subscriptions, your readers can now manage many of their basic reader account functions right from your blog site (some advanced reader account management still takes place in a BlogHarbor-branded preferences page).
The My Preferences page now allows a reader to update their Name, email address, Display Name, Language Preference (English, French, or Spanish), or password right within your blog's preferences page. Readers can now also permanently delete their account from this page.
A testimonials box has been aded to the sidebar of our home page. We hope this will help visitors to choose us as their preferred blog hosting provider, but we also hope it will help to send new readers to your blogs.
If you're interested in having your testimonial appear on our home page, please post your testimonial to this forum thread. Include your real name if you want it to appear, and the URL of your weblog if you would like us to link your name to your site.
System Update 12/02/2006
We will be performing an update to our network during the following period:
During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as we update our system.
This maintenance period was originally scheduled for 11-25, but was rescheduled in order to allow us to perform additional testing.
What is this maintenance for?
We will be performing a System Update during this period which will provide enhancements to the reader account signup and management system. Your readers will now be able to signup for an account and perform many account management functions without leaving your weblog.
Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by the length of this maintenance window and as always, we thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider.
System Maintenance 11/18/2006
We will be performing maintenance on our network during the following period:
During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed.
What is this maintenance for?
A network and database upgrade will be conducted to ensure optimal performance and scalability of our system.
Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by the length of this maintenance window and as always, we thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider.
System Maintenance 10/14/2006 and 10/28/2006
We will be performing maintenance on our network during the following periods:
During these periods, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline.
What is this maintenance for?
Maintenance on our database systems will be conducted during these windows. This maintenance will allow us to increase the capacity and performance of our database systems, and also to reduce the downtime required during future maintenance periods.
System Maintenance 9/23/2006
We will be performing maintenance on our network during the following period:
During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed.
What is this maintenance for?
Updates will be made to our disk storage systems in order to enable our platform to handle additional capacity.
System Templates Updated
Changes were made to our commenting system during System Update 2006-06-29 aimed at increasing performance and improving the security of the system against comment spam.
We try to avoid making changes to the system that would require modification of your custom templates, unfortunately it was necessary to update the default base, article, photo, movie_review, music_review, and book_review templates in order to implement this updated commenting system. If you have customized any of these templates, it will be necessary to roll our updates back into your customized template in order to re-enable commenting on your blog. This page will explain how to add these changes into your custom templates. If you have not already customized your templates, then you can ignore these instructions; your blog will receive the updated system templates automatically.
As a result of this revision to the commenting system, the comment form (and Comment Verification image known as a CAPTCHA) does not display immediately when your blog article loads, the comment box will appear only when your visitor clicks on the Post a Comment link. Not only will this change reduce the amount of comment spam targeted at your blog, but it also will increase the speed at which your article pages load.
We apologize for the necessity of this change and for the lack of advanced notice.
Access your blog's control panel and go to Look & Feel > Templates. Click on Edit in the article row. Look for the following code in your custom template:
{{if allow_comments}}
{{if can_post}}
<div style="margin-bottom:20px;"><a href="#post_comment"><%= gettext("Post a comment") %></a></div>
{{/if}} <!-- can_post -->
{{/if}} <!-- allow_comments -->
It might look like this, depending on when you originally made your customization:
{{if allow_comments}}
{{if can_post}}
<div style="margin-bottom:20px;"><a href="#post_comment">Post a comment</a></div>
{{/if}} <!-- can_post -->
{{/if}} <!-- allow_comments -->
Change that code to the following:
{{if allow_comments}}
<div style="margin-bottom:20px;"><a href="#post_comment" onclick="return reveal_post_comment_inline(true, false);"><%= gettext("Post a comment") %></a></div>
{{/if}} <!-- allow_comments -->
Click on Update Live Template. Your article template should now be updated with the most recent code. If you have made customizations to your photo, movie_review, music_review, or book_review templates, repeat this step for each of your customized templates.
Access your blog's control panel and go to Look & Feel > Templates. Click on Edit in the base row. Look for the following lines near the top of your base template:
{{include name="javascript.html"}}
If it exists, delete it. Your template may or may not contain this line depending on when you customized your template. If you find it, remove it, but if you don't see it there's nothing wrong.
Next, look for the following line:
</head>
and right above it, enter the following:
{{include name="utils.js"}}
<script language="JavaScript" type="text/javascript"><!--
// translate common phrases
translator.settext("by", "<%= gettext("by") %>");
translator.settext("Anonymous", "<%= gettext("Anonymous") %>");
translator.settext("on", "<%= gettext("on") %>");
translator.settext("Permanent Link", "<%= gettext("Permanent Link") %>");
translator.settext("Profile", "<%= gettext("Profile") %>");
translator.settext("Reply", "<%= gettext("Reply") %>");
// -->
</script>
Click on Update Live Template. Your base template will now be updated with the most recent code, and comment functionality should now be restored.
If you have customized your templates and want us to roll the new changes into your existing article or body templates, please contact us; we'd be happy to make these changes for you.
Again, if you have never customized your blog templates, then it is not necessary for you to make any changes to your blog templates, as these changes have automatically been integrated into the default templates.
Our apologies to all of our users for the necessity of these changes, we hope that the new commenting system will meet its goals of decreasing comment spam and increasing the speed of your blog.
System Update 6/29/2006
We will be performing an update to our network during the following period:
During this period, we will be performing a System Update which will not require any downtime, though there may be periods during this window where the system performs slower than normal as we bring servers offline for an upgrade before returning them to the network.
This update will feature the following changes:
Thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider.
System Maintenance 6/29/2006
We will be performing maintenance on our network during the following period:
During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as a brief database maintenance is performed.
This maintenance was originally scheduled for June 24, but we were unable to perform the maintenance at that time. Our apologies for the inconvenience.
System Maintenance 5/13/2006
We will be performing maintenance on our network during the following period:
During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed.
What is this maintenance for?
New front end caching servers were installed during our April
maintenance; these servers will be activated during this window. We
expect that these servers will improve overall performance
significantly, particularly during times of heavy load. Additional
information about these caching servers is available at the page
Caching Servers Added to Network to Improve Performance.
Thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider.
Caching Servers Added to Network to Improve Performance
SQUID Caching Servers Deployed
New Caching Servers known as SQUID servers have been deployed on our network in order to improve the overall efficiency of the system and speed up delivery of your blog pages. These servers will be enabled during a maintenance window on May 13, 2006. The caching servers allow blog pages that have not changed to be served by a caching server rather than accessing the database directly for each access request.
The SQUID Caching Servers continually check your blog content to verify that it has not changed. It if has changed then it retrieves the most updated content which in turn becomes the new cache. If the content has not changed then SQUID continues to serve the cached content.
These Caching Servers will serve cached content for 1 minute, which means that an unauthenticated user may see data that is up to 1 minute old. Authenticated users, i.e. users who have logged in to your blog, will always bypass the Caching Servers and access the system directly.
Publishers can ensure that they are viewing a non-cached version of the blog by logging in at the blog itself since all authenticated users are accessing the non-cached version of the site. Publishers also have another option when logged into the control panel: clicking on the View Blog link at the top of the control panel allows publishers to bypass the cache and directly view the live database. This allows you to easily view the real-time version of your after posting an article to your blog.
System Maintenance 4/22/2006
We will be performing maintenance on our network during the following period:
During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed. While there may be up to 8 hours of downtime as a result of this maintenance, we will do our best to bring your blog back online as soon as possible.
What is this maintenance for?
Our database software will be upgraded to a new revision of the
software during this maintenance. Additionally, new front end caching
servers will be installed which will improve performance
significantly, particularly during times of heavy load.
Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by the length of this maintenance window and as always, we thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider.
Pricing Reduced on Pro and Power Plans
Effective immediately, prices have been reduced on our highest capacity hosting plans.
The Pro package with 3 GB Disk Space and 20 GB Monthly Bandwidth, which was formerly priced at $27.95/month, has been reduced to $24.95/month or $249.50 when billed annually.
The Power package with 5 GB Disk Space and 40 GB Monthly Bandwidth, previously $44.95/month, has been dropped to $34.95/month or $349.50 when billed annually.
| Disk Space | Monthly Bandwidth | Old Price | New Price | Savings | |
| Pro | 3 GB | 20 GB | $27.95 | $24.95 | 11% |
| Power | 5 GB | 40 GB | $44.95 | $34.95 | 22% |
Our complete list of services is available here.
System Maintenance 3/16/2006
In order to immediately improve the performance of our system, we will be performing an emergency maintenance on our network this evening during the following period:
During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed.
What is this maintenance for?
We have discovered some instabilities with our database as a result of
our upgrade this past weekend. These issues have been causing slow
page loads on both blogs and the control panel. Consultations with
some of the best database analysts in the country have provided us
with information on how to solve these issues, and in order to begin
this process it will be necessary to immediately perform maintenance
on the database itself.
We don't expect this maintenance window to last more than two hours, and we're very sorry to have to do this maintenance on such short notice. We do expect that this maintenance will have an immediate effect on returning our database response times to acceptable levels, and it will allow us to make additional changes in the short term aimed at improving system response.
Again, we apologize for the short notice for tonight's maintenance window, but we feel that it is necessary to immediately improve the reliability of our system.
System Update 3/11/2006
A System Update was performed on the BlogHarbor network overnight. We're very happy to announce significant enhancements to our commenting system, as well as additional protection against trackback and comment spam. The highlights of the upgrade are listed on this page.
Comment and Trackback Moderation
BlogHarbor now allows for blog publishers to moderate comments and trackbacks. If Moderation is enabled, comments or Trackbacks will not be immediately posted to a blog until the Publisher approves them. Blog readers who post a comment on a blog with Moderation enabled will see a message when the comment is accepted.
Publishers can choose never to moderate Comments and Trackbacks, to moderate only those suspected of being spam, or to always moderate. Publishers will be notified by email of comments in their moderation queue. The email notification is a system message sent to the email address configured for the Publisher in the Blog Profile; the message indicates the number of items queued for moderation. Moderation Queue notifications themselves are queued, and sent every 30 minutes. The content of this queue notification is currently not configurable.
Our Publisher's manual has additional information on moderating comments and trackbacks here:
Spam Protection Settings
A new page called Spam Protection Settings has been added to the control panel at Settings & Security -> Publishing Defaults. The following spam protection settings are available from this page:
Anonymous Comments have been significantly improved; readers who do not have a Reader Account can now leave contact information including their Name, Email, and URL along with their comment. Their Name and URL will be displayed on the comment, and the email address will be shown in the control panel. Read Allowing anonymous comments for more information.
Additional options are also available for Comment Verification. Publishers can now choose to disable Comment Verification for Logged-in Readers. Comment verification will always required for anonymous commenters and on all trial accounts.
For more information on the new Spam Protection Settings, please see these pages in the Publisher's Manual:
Downloadable Server Logs Now Available
We now offer the ability for publishers to download a server log file. The statistics file is a raw Apache log file with all confidential information removed. The downloadable file will be available for each day in a 7 day rotating cycle. See the manual page Download Web Server Log for more information.
Architectural Changes
Our internal database tables were modified to ensure that the frequently updated tables are structured more efficiently.
Rate Limiting
Limits were added to the number of Categories, Comments, Trackbacks, Articles, and Moblogs per blog. We expect that these limits will not affect legitimate publishers but will prevent spammers from abusing our system.
Referer Blocking
An additional option has been added to the Referer statistics page within the Site Stats section of the control panel. It is now possible to add Referers to the blog firewall via a Delete and Block button.
This ability to block unwanted referers will enable you to reduce the effects of referer spammers. Visitors who are blocked from will now see an "Access Denied" error message when attempting to access your site via a link from a site on your Firewall.
System Maintenance 2/11/2006
We will be performing maintenance on our network during the following period:
During this period, both weblogs and the admin control panel will be offline as maintenance is performed.
What is this maintenance for?
An upgrade to our service is planned for later this month which will
feature enhancements to our commenting system, additional protection
against trackback and comment spam, as well as optimizations to our
database system which will allow for improved performance and
increased stability. This maintenance window will allow us to make
preparations for that upgrade.
Our apologies in advance for any inconvenience caused by the length of this maintenance window, and thank you for choosing BlogHarbor as your full service weblog hosting provider.
Update: This maintenance required less time than originally estimated, and was complete at approximately 1:05 AM EST.
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