In light of the Haiti tragedy, I’m asking that anyone who was considering making a donation to Brass Goggles in the near future direct those funds to Doctors Without Borders instead. This is a worthy and effective charity, and is not associated with any religious or political group.  There is a donation banner on the right side of the blog site, and I’m providing another in this post for the convenience of our feed subscribers.

We now return you to your regularly-schedule steampunk.

(Note: This name is still not set in stone and subject to change depending on the communities’ reaction however, this name will now be officially used until enough surveys and mailing list subscriptions have been completed.)

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Official Website

TBD (Awaiting vote on Guild name)

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Twitter Feed

Used for future AGIE updates rather than spamming Brass Goggles with posts.

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Mailing List

The core AGIE mailing list.

We urgently need as many people as possible to join the mailing list but more importantly, take part in the survey! Anybody from any walk of life within the Steampunk community is welcome to join this list regardless of location. Please note we have a large opening for skilled artists to work with members of the guild in exchange for each other’s services as well. One of the guilds aims is to become the ultimate one stop repository of skilled proffesionals from the Steampunk community for both personal and corporate client bases. However the guild itself will always remain strictly none-profit. The exchange of money will be solely controlled by the parties involved. Authorisation most be sought from the guild prior to this so as not to bring the guild into disrepute for its other members. Providing previous examples of your work will satisfy this so that we hold a strong quality base.

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Discussion Thread

Temporary base of guild discussions until a proper structure has been put in place and the name of the guild voted on. After which, the website shall have its own dedicated forums.

A NOTE FROM YOUR BLOG ADMIN – please take all discussion of this over to the forum.  Comment fields are NOT the place for lengthy discussion or debate. Thanks, Harold

If you still see comments in the main feed after 48 hours, please reply to this post.

If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, then kindly ignore this message.

Unfortunately, it took us by surprise, and the swell of interest has proved a little too much for our server. We’re working on keeping it online, and making improvements to make sure it can handle even more growth.

Thanks for your patience while our team of volunteers (me) works on things!

Update: we’ve upgraded our server! See this topic for details.  Thanks for all your patience!

First, I have just completed applying security patches to all the plugins we use.

Second, we’ve migrated our RSS feed to use FeedBurner – the old feed will still work, but if you’d be so kind as to use the new feed, I’d be grateful. Find the new feed URL using your browser’s auto-discovery system or by using the Entries RSS link you find at the bottom of every page.

Finally, we’ve migrated the comments system to DISQUS. This should reduce spam, and also make it easier for people to comment, while saving us oodles of bandwidth and making moderation and tracking tremendously easier. It may be a little while before old comments appear – there are a lot of them to convert – so don’t fret.

Hopefully, these changes will be for the better, but they can be backed out if they’re really problematic.

Cheers! We now return you to your irregularly-unscheduled weblog updates.

Unplanned Downtime

On June 16, at approximately 17:00 UTC, the web hosting provider used by Brass Goggles began a short planned downtime for security updates and routine maintenance to their VPS hosting services.  Our VPS node never came back on line after this down time.  The situation was resolve at approximately 20:00 UTC on June 17.

Our hosting provider worked diligently to resolve the issue, and I’m extremely pleased with their customer service.

Planned Downtime

Between June 18 at 18:00 UTC, and concluding June 22 at 15:00 UTC, Brass Goggles will be undergoing intermittent periods of planned downtime to test new backup and restore procedures and perform system and software upgrades.

At this time, I only expect short interruptions in service, less than 30 minutes each. Additionally, I expect periods of slower service throughout.

For about a month now, the forum has been located at http://brassgoggles.co.uk/forum instead of /bg-forum ; likewise the blog has been at /blog rather than /brassgoggles. Requests made using the old paths have been transparently redirected so as to avoid breaking links.

The planned updates may break this ability; old links may be redirected to a “not found” page which provides a link to a likely new location.

Watch this space, and follow brasstech on Twitter, for updates.

There are several security and performance-related patches that have been tested against the various bits under the bonnet of the BrassGoggles blog and forum, and we’ll be installing these starting tonight, and extending through the weekend.

We’re also taking this opportunity to perform a little maintenance and retooling so that things continue to run efficiently.

At various times over the next several days, you may notice some intermittent down time as various components are taken down for maintenance. We don’t anticipate any particular instance of downtime to be more than about 15 minutes.

I have set up a status page on a separate server; check there for updates if you’re curious. If you have questions about this project, ask them in the comments here: I will do my best to answer them as I have time.

Update 2009-05-07 09:52:06 CT: Intermittent issues with database corruption have prompted a rebuild of the database. A few recent comments on the blog and forum may have been lost, but this damage should be minimal. Database config changes have been made in an attempt to correct this issue; unfortunately, all we can do at this point is watch and hope.

My apologies for the short notice: we’d intended to manage this a little more slowly, but were caught off guard by a particular requirement of our upgrade process that I hadn’t planned for.

At this time, the comments to the blog are disabled, and the forum has been taken off-line. This is to prevent data loss as we make the move. This is no longer true.  Comment and forum-ify away!

This move should go much more smoothly than the last round, since we’re staying with the same hosting company, and just moving to a bigger server.  Thanks to everyone who has donated so far, you’ve made this move possible for at least the next few months.  Please continue to support our plan to be funded for 5 years by following the Amazon badge found in the Donate area of the right column (waaaay at the bottom).

Soon, soon, Now, we will no longer have our 503 errors that have plauged the forum of late! (fingers firmly crossed).