Dear Mouseplanet,

I'm just one time zone away from Anaheim. I like to check Mouseplanet for daily updates before I go to work in the morning. Typically, I find the daily update has not yet been posted (yes, I make sure my browser is not just loading from cache).

Would it be possible to post daily updates bit earler in the day? I'm sure East Coast readers would appreciate this even more than I would. I know it's no fun to get up early in order to push new pages out to the server. Perhaps you could could automate the process to run in the wee small hours.

Thanks.

What, you want us to get up at 4:00 in the morning just for you? :~D

You could always read today's update before work tomorrow.

Sorry. I guess I could also just stop reading Mouseplanet altogether.

Originally posted by Klutch
Sorry. I guess I could also just stop reading Mouseplanet altogether.

That doesn't seem to be a very nice response. Given the time zone differences (and presumably, that the updates can't be loaded automatically but need to rather be done by a human), it doesn't seem unreasonable that your request was denied.

You can always read the update when you get home or the next morning.

I know of at least one other Disney related fan site that is based in Orange County that doesn't update until later in the day. There have been times when I left for work without getting the Mouseplanet updates before I left and Oh well, I will read it when I get home.

Originally posted by Klutch
I know it's no fun to get up early in order to push new pages out to the server. Perhaps you could could automate the process to run in the wee small hours. Oh, you wanted a real answer?

For now, the "publish" is done manually. One of the items on our "Things that would be really nice some day" list is a content management system, which would allow us to automate the publishing process.

vBulletin, the company which created the discussion board software we use, was planning to release such a program in January. Last January. Just as soon as they got done with v3.0 of the software we are currently using. This was supposed to be released in 2002.

We have discussed many, many options, and our current plan is to wait for the vB CMS system. That may change.

Trust us, we hear you. But, unless one of our East Coast contributors starts handling the daily publish, our schedule won't change too much anytime soon.

AVP

Thanks, AVP. I apologize for my response not being very nice. Yes, I wanted a real answer. "No," is fine. I just didn't like being blown off. OK, I was being thin-skinned.

Anyway, as a Unix administrator, I was thinking it would be easy to simply schedule a cron job to automatically ftp the day's content to the ISP. I now realize that Mouseplanet is likely built on Windows platforms, which I expect would not be easy to automate. Since there are many Disney fan sites, I also thought Mouseplanet might enjoy an edge over the rest by being updated early. But hey, this isn't the New York times, after all. :)

Maybe Mouseplanet should go Linux? :D

Originally posted by Klutch
Anyway, as a Unix administrator, I was thinking it would be easy to simply schedule a cron job to automatically ftp the day's content to the ISP. The loud crackling noise you just heard were my eyes glazing over at the word "cron." If there was more to that sentance, I missed it. (Hey, I'm married to a tech geek, I don't claim to be one)

Whatever you just said, I'm sure Alex, Tony and Andrew, et al, have discussed it. (I would have no memory, since I probably fell asleep the moment the word "cron" was uttered). And I'm sure there's some perfectly reasonable explaination for why we're still doing it the way we're doing it. Maybe one of them could tell you - I need to go prop my eyelids up.

Linux - isn't that the one with the cute penguin? I'm all for anything that comes with a cute penguin.

AVP

Yes, Penguin Power!

Thanks again, AVP.

Originally posted by AVP But, unless one of our East Coast contributors starts handling the daily publish, our schedule won't change too much anytime soon.

Unfortunately, the way this household runs, the chances are slim and none, and Slim just left town. Up and out the door, no chance to do anything. (Unless you want me to publish at 2am Eastern...) :rolleyes:

I don't see why MousePlanet couldn't be given cron jobs, even if they didn't have Linux Running. They could always just take a Linux Computer, then run a cron job to ftp the info over to the windows system. Of course, it really all depends on how you guys have your servers set up. If you are on a remote dedicated, it may be a little harder than if you were on a local server. And you run your own DNS servers, so you arn't on a shared server. The mystery continues.

Oh, and AVP, a cron job is kinda like the "Schudle" feature in Windows. It allows you to do a certin task at a certin time. :)

Ok, this gets into my domain, at least to an extent. We are on a dedicated server, and are running Linux. For a lot of different reasons (some architectural, some operational, etc), the cron method really isn't suitable for us at the moment.

As AVP mentioned above, we are looking at several solutions, some of which might allow us to cover what you are asking for. But for now, I don't think we will see many changes. So for now, as has been the case for the past three years, there will continue to be days where you'll get to read the update with your lunch.

(I can sympathize with the frustration, given how often my day job has me on the east coast.)

Tony

Why not just FTP it manually the night before?

Originally posted by justagrrl
Why not just FTP it manually the night before? Let me preface this by saying we know you guys are only trying to help. When these types of questions come up - why don't we have Avitars, why is the site running slowly, why does such-and-such happen - a lot of the posters are full of suggestions.

And they are perfectly valid suggestions, and they probably seem really sensible to the person making them. But they might not be viable in our real production environment.

As Tony said above, there are a lot of architectural and operational reasons why we do things a certain way. But, in the end, it usually boils down to "because this is the easiest way to accomplish what we need to with the resources we have."

justagrrl, without getting into the specifics of how the site is published every night, I will simply say that we don't publish the site the night before because it usually isn't easier than the way we do it now.

SOME nights it is, and on those nights we do. I've been on the site at 11pm and been surprised to see the next day's update already posted. But, depending on who is doing what each day, most days it's easier for the people doing the work to publish in the morning. And that's just the way it is.

I think Tony and I have both agreed that it would be lovely for the site to be published at 2am each day. We would love for that to be the case, and we've explained that we are looking at some solutions. Tony tried to explain to me last night why a "cron" job won't work in our environment - I fell asleep during the explaination, but I believe him.

So, it's not that we're ignoring the request - we hear you, and we agree. But, as we have both said, it isn't going to happen anytime soon.

AVP

Now that I think about it, Tony is right in saying a Cron probably would not work. Running a Cron does open up a security hole, and you also might run into some promblems with, for some reason, the Cron not running, and then no one noticing until 12 PM that day. Then you would be worse off :) ;)


I still don't really get how you are going to get the CMS to automatically update it without doing some major hacking, but you guys probably have it all figured out :)

~DF

(who wishes HE had a CMS that would do that, insted of pesky old PHP-Nuke :D)

I'm usually the one who does the publish and there are many things that could be done to automate the publishing process (and many of them are in place. Generally publishing the new days content simply requires renaming a couple files.

But, the reason that the publish has been happening around 6:30am PT is because my schedule lately has been such that this is when I finally get everything put together to publish. When I'm less busy we try to publish around 11pm. But lately I get home and don't get it all done. So I get up at 5:30 and finish. Thus the publish between 6 and 7.

There was a snafu last week that resulted in me not publishing until 7am, but that was completely anomalous.

I think getting the update out by 6:30 AM PT is great; I guess it just has not been the case when I check by 8 AM MT lately.

Anyway, thanks for all the hard work you put in, oh dedicated 'Planeteers. The fact you received so many comments and suggestions about daily updates should reassure you that your work is not done in vain.

So, Alex, have you been hit with some severe insomina? I think this whole week (through Wednesday anyway) the updates have been up before 6:00am Central time.

If you guys were able to make a change to make it possible, just thought I'd say "Thanks. Yes, we did notice." For that matter, even if it is temporary, Thanks, and yes, it was noticed.