What's happened to phlog?

If you're reading this, you're probably an existing user of phlog.net from way back. If you are, then you're probably wondering why everything is different around here.

You may have read my earlier messages on phlog about me writing a completely new version of phlog. Well, this is (part) of it. Consider this very much a work-in-progress, but after the old phlog getting seriously swamped by spam and denial-of-service attacks, I decided to drop some features from the new phlog (or rather just disable and put-on-hold for a while) and simply get the new release out.

One of the reasons it's taken longer than anticipated is that migrating an 8 year old database to a completely new application, along with moving over 40gigabytes of photos from the old storage system to a completely different system. If you ever want to hear the gory details, just buy me a few beers and settle in for a long tale of database schema optimisations and the pitfalls of different character encoding schemes.

So, welcome to the new phlog. I've tried my best to keep all of the existing features intact, but have had to drop a few (let's see what you all notice ;) ). The biggest thing that some of you will no doubt notice is that there are no longer custom styling for your phlogs. Don't worry - adding phlog customisation is a very high priority, but since the code for the phlog pages is now different (and will likely change a little bit over the coming weeks), your old css simply wouldn't work. So, rather than have your pages screwed up, I've defaulted all phlogs to the standard template and will add custom stylesheets in the very near future.

Hopefully you will notice that things are a little faster and hopefully more stable. There are too many small changes that I couldn't even imaging to list them all - please just play around and let me know if anything either doesn't make sense or isn't working correctly.

Please consider this a beta release - There are no doubt a few bugs and a few unfinished features. If you have absolutely any comments, feedback, complaints or requests, don't hesitate to mail me at alan@phlog.net.

You may notice that I've re-added the donations button on the dashboard page. Some of you may not know, but phlog is entirely developed, maintained, hosted and funded from my own pocket. There is currently no advertising on phlog (and I sincerely want to keep it that way), no corporate sponsors or backers - I pay all costs myself.

If you would like to help me out and support the continued development and hosting of phlog, please consider making a small donation. As a big thank you, for anyone who makes a donation I will enable storage of larger versions of your images - up to 1280x1024, whereas normally only smaller (640x480) sized versions of your photos are stored.

For any donations over $20 I will enable storage of the original-sized images on your account. These can be as large as you want, but obviously storing all of those 12 megapixel images doesn't come for free!

Just be sure to tell me your phlog username on the paypal donation form.

I would just like to say a huge thank you to every single one of you that has supported phlog over the years. I know it's been a bit of a bumpy ride, but consider this the beginning of the next chapter of phlog's life.

Keep phlogging!

Alan