Just Journal Developer Blog

Friday morning, we had the boot drive in our server fail.  It was an Imation 32GB SSD drive that was purchased on December 27, 2009 and installed in February.  The whole point of a SSD is greater reliability and we've learned that's not the case.  

The drive is still readable (mostly) but writes to the disk are failing.  

About half the services are back up on the server, and this site is one of them. 

I finally started on version 2.0 of this website.  The new version is going to be a partial rewrite.  It will still be open source and in Java though. I'm working on it via a private git repository right now.  Until I get the structure just right, it's easier than CVS.  

I have several goals in mind:

1. Pictures will be stored on the file system, allowing them to be larger and post processed if needed. 

2. Video storage (although don't expect youtube quality because i just don't know how to do that)

3. Exports.. i've promised this for years, but I want to allow exporting via XML in addition to the RTF and PDF formats now. This also allows users to backup their own blogs.

4. Portability.  Just Journal effectively runs on Tomcat right now with a very specific configuration. I want to get it it usable on other domains, platforms, and maybe even databases.  I like MySQL, but it's future is uncertain with the Oracle acquisition.  

5. Ajax.  I may not go crazy with this, but I've had to learn a lot of AJAX with Dojo for work in the last year and I might as well experiment with it here. 

6. Improved mobile accessibility.

A new Just Journal SSL certificate has been installed.   

We had some downtime over the weekend due to two things.  First, our router died connecting us to the internet.  Second, we got a new frontend server (this site runs from 2 servers combined).  We replaced an 8 year old dell precision workstation with a new HP server.  It's much faster and hopefully more reliable.  

I'm testing some new RSS code tonight.  We'll see how well it works.  

The new site update introduced a few new features and a few new bugs.  I'm now using jtidy to process HTML based blog posts.  It cleans up several invalid HTML tags.  However, it's also formatting the entire blog post as an HTML page.  Until I can extract the body of the post out, it may cause a few rendering bugs in browsers and add extra white space around entries in PDFs.  Sorry about that.

The good news is that PDFs can now include private blog entries when you are logged in and accessing your own blog.  It should also work if your blog is marked private. 

I've just released an update to allow authenticated users to access their PDF/RTF of their blog.  

 We're currently down as our upstream provider has an outage.  (we have no internet connection)  

I upgraded the RAM to 2GB in the server for Just Journal tonight.  It should make the site a little faster, although don't expect a lot.  The memory chips are even matching now :)

Server was up 30 days previously.  I also took the opportunity to clean it out.   

I've noticed some "slowness" while posting blog entries.  I've narrowed it down to one of the "PING" services. It's very likely that this can be fixed in the next day or so depending on how busy I get at work. 

I haven't forgotten about the promises I made regarding fixing some outstanding bugs with the site.  I started rewriting the "edit" page for blog entries.   It will look more like the update journal page when I'm done.  I've also started migrating the data access code to Cayenne.  

I'm working on some bug fixes for some errors reported to me last weekend with this site.  It's taken me longer than expected due to some work related adventures and security problems that had to be resolved with one of my other open source projects. 

1.7 Release

http://www.justjournal.com/software/windows.jsp 

The new version of just journal is now live!  It contains some bug fixes, caching improvements (for the client), and users can now cancel their own accounts.

I've been working on the jj source code while I wait for my pc to start working.  I've cleaned up 25 warnings, and implemented ETag support for some parts of the site.  I also have some new caching rules I'm testing for the RSS feeds to speed up loading from cache.  Not everything on this site should be blocked from caching.

I've also been changing the expires and last-modified header logic.

I'm hoping to publish this soon. 

The site was down due to a hack on another site hosted on the server.  As a precaution, I brought the system down and did a fresh os install.  The attacker was not very careful and left a great deal of log evidence.  I do not believe any information was taken.  User passwords are never stored in clear text, only hashed.  If you are concerned, change your password.  

For those interested, the attacker gained access as the webserver user (not root) via a cgi program.  I have deleted the program. 

In short:  New database server, faster, report bugs

Long version:

About six months ago, I started migrating all of the databases on my server to a new system.  The last database to be moved was for this site.  I had some problems exporting the data due to bugs in the version of MySQL I was using.  Finally, I've migrated the database to the new server.  In the long run, this should make the site faster and more responsive.  The new system is just a database server and it has the same amount of RAM and faster processing than the previous shared server.

 There was a design consideration for just journal that I now regret where I stored image files for the site in MySQL.  This was much easier to implement and I got to avoid file system security problems as well as storing all information together.  However, data export has been very poor and this also concerns me in terms of backups.  I plan on migrating all of the images to the file system as soon as possible. Work might complicate that plan.  I believe I've restored all images except one which happened to be in my blog. 

Please report any problems with any part of the site.  Only the database moved, so the code is the same.  If it worked previously, and does not now, it' s important I get it fixed. 

 I just renewed the SSL cert for justjournal.com.  It should work for another year. 

I'm working on the "cancel" page now.  It's a real hassle to manually delete an account for someone.  As the feature set grows, so do the tables in the database.  I'll post the new working cancel code at some point in the future.  I'm in the middle of other projects right now. 

 I've been working on some changes for the unix client.  It now allows you to change the host (for other justjournal installs), supports subjects, and has better error handling. 

I'm also working on some new features to the blogger api and the normal journal update code.

 Tonight I noticed that there have been delays with the pinging services while posting blog entries.  When I get time, I'd like to work on making that process a background operation on a separate thread. 

This website has been slow lately.  Most of the problem is high amounts of traffic to my other open source project website.  It should slow down in a few days.

I've also got a new version of just journal almost ready to release.  It fixes bugs with RSS feeds, redundant attempts to close connections, etc.  It also add some support for Sphere.  This service is used by many sites to feature blog content related to other stories, etc.  For instance, CNN uses it.  It will only be in effect for public entries and I plan to make it opt in.