I published a system update that will hopefully help cut down on spam form submissions on your sites. I’ve integrated reCAPTCHA v2 for all standard contact forms.
If you’re using the advanced contact form plugin or you’ve created a custom contact form, the reCAPTCHA is not used and nothing has changed. For the vast majority, though, the reCAPTCHA should cut down on the number of spam submissions that you get in your inbox.
If you’d rather not add an extra step for legitimate site visitors, you can, optionally, disable the reCAPTCHA for each for individually.
I was notified by Amazon Web Services this morning that the hardware running the Net-at-hand service looked like it was going to fail very soon and would be shut down completely on 9/28.
I decided to preempt any failure and reboot onto a new machine before anything bad happened.
The total downtime was 20 minutes and nothing bad happened. All is running well.
We just finished rolling out some design changes to the Net-at-hand interface. Here is a list of some of the changes:
The contact support page has been redesigned to make it clear what email address the support requests will be replied to.
The font of the interface has been changed to Source Sans Pro, a great-looking open source font designed by Adobe.
The login page has been completely redesigned with a much cleaner looking interface. Going forward, this is going to set the standard for the Net-at-hand interface design.
I’m very excited to announce the immediate availablility of the Net-at-hand API. I’ve been working hard on this over the last several weeks and it is now ready for any programmer to get thier hands on.
The Net-at-hand API will allow web developers to write applications that have complete CRUD (create, read, update, destroy) access to their clients, sites, and content. There are some features that are missing (such as attachments and designs), but those should be coming in the future. With the API, developers now have the ability to easily incorporate Net-at-hand into their systems.
I’ll be posting documentation for the API as I am able, but it is pretty simple. In the mean time, you can contact me for more information.
PS—This blog post is the first content posted on Net-at-hand via the API.
Net-at-hand is scheduled a move to a new server on Friday, February 24, at 10:00 pm CST. This move will increase the performance of the system and will provide more infrastructure flexibility as Net-at-hand continues to grow.
After Net-at-hand moves, the entire system and all the websites running on it will exist at a different IP address (see below if you need an explanation). For a period of time (several weeks at least), the old server will be running in conjunction with the new server so both IP addresses will work equally well (although the old server may seem to run a little slower as page views are sent to the new server behind the scenes).
If your website is using it’s own domain name, then after the server move you will want to change the IP address that your domain name is pointing to. Follow the instructions on the Net-at-hand help page to point your domain name to the new server. The IP address for the new server is107.22.221.174.
What is an IP address?
An IP address is a series of four numbers that uniquely identifies every computer that is connected to the internet. When you set up a domain name, you have to put the IP address for the server that is running your website into the DNS settings for the domain.
Update
Note that you should not update your domain’s IP address to the new one until after the server maintenance on Friday evening (2/24). The new server will not be operational until then.
All of the Net-at-hand websites were down for about two hours today (from 10:20 am CDT until around 12:25 CDT). I started receiving notification of connection errors when the Net-at-hand application was trying to connect to the database. After restarting the server and verifying the problem with the database, I decided to stop the system temporarily and rebuild the database.
In the three years that Net-at-hand has been running on this server I have not rebuilt the database at all, and it makes sense that some of the data files might have been getting corrupted. So I made a fresh backup of the database and rebuilt the data tables from the backup. I also took the opportunity to get rid of some old data that was in the database to help keep things slim. No data was lost during this outage.
As I was working on this, I fired up the new database server that Net-at-hand is going to be migrating to. This is a server dedicated to the database only and will greatly help the performance of the system as Net-at-hand continues to grow. I had the new server at the ready in case rebuilding the database did not fix the connection problems that were happening, but it did so that has been put back on the normal schedule.
The timetable for migrating the Net-at-hand system to the new infrastructure is progessing on schedule and I plan to have it all in place within the next couple of months.
I am sorry for the downtime (especially in the middle of the work day). Please accept my sincere apology.
—Mark (Net-at-hand founder)
One good thing that did come out of this is that I was able to test the process I’ve been planning for migrating Net-at-hand to the new system (and under extreme pressure). With what I learned from this situation, the downtime should be just a few minutes (a couple of application restarts) instead of the couple hours that I was planning.
I’ve put together a rough video explaining the basic steps of gettings started with the Net-at-hand CMS. It has some rough edges, but I thought I would post it here in case it can help anyone out.
I’ve updated all the installations of the blog comments plugin which should help those who are using it, especially if your website generates high traffic volumes.
Here are the basics of what was changed:
The main blog page (that has the list of the recent blog posts) no longer shows the number of comments for the post. This was moved to the blog post itself.
If a blog post has more than 20 comments, they have been divided up into pages of 20 comments each. So, for example, if a blog post has 218 comments, at the top of the comments it will show “Displaying 1-20 of 218”. At the bottom of the comments there will be links to the other pages of comments.
In the admin area, the comments have been divided into pages to make it easier (or even possible for some of you) to view and moderate the comments.
Make sure you contact support if you need any help.