News
Fundraiser Over - 02/10/2006 15:56 GMT
Well, thats it. In only 16 days we were able to raise all $3,000 needed for the upgrades/bandwidth/test server. I would like to thank everyone who donated, your help is VERY much appreciated.
As promised the google banner is gone from gentoo-portage.com and will be gone until october of next year.
If you donated $50 or more and were going for teh free hosting i was offering fromt eh wiki page, give me a shout and we can set you up ASAP.
Change of IP - 30/09/2006 21:59 GMT
You may have noticed the outage the other day. Well our upstream host dropped an oc3 and decided to leave us in the cold for 24h+, so we swapped ips and moved to a new upstream carrier.
This shouldent happen again, I'm talking with my hosting provider and we should have some multi-upstream connection action coming soon.
There may be a couple small DNS problems. I'm working those out now.
Fundraiser - 16/09/2006 18:48 GMT
Gentoo-Wiki.com and Gentoo-Portage.com are having a fundraiser. Read more...
We are attempting to raise $3,000 to pay for some upgrades to our servers as well as to cover our bandwidth costs. This fundraiser will run until October 15th 2006.
Also: If we raise are able to raise all $3,000 or more before this fundraiser finishes I will be removing the all advertising from gentoo-portage.com for 1 year.
I would like to thank everyone in advance for your donation, your support is very much appreciated.
Upcoming Fundraiser - 11/09/2006 19:43 GMT
Last week I wrote about swapping the banner on the site to the new ebay banner; In response I got many emails from people offering bandwidth, money, etc. In response I will be hosting a fundraiser for both this site and gentoo-wiki.com starting this friday. (The new banner is not doing any better then the adsense banner was)
How much we will be attempting to raise I have not determined just yet, but my hope is to raise enough to cover the gap between what adsense pays and what the servers cost for a period of 1 year, as well as cover the cost of a few upgrades to the servers that gentoo-portage.com and gentoo-wiki.com run on.
Also I would like to share with everyone one of those emails offering to donate money, I found if very clever:
Hey there....
Yes, I'm a Gentoo nut. An enthusiast, bordering on religious fanaticism. I preach the word of of the Good Book (Gentoo Install Handbook) whenever possible, and spread the gospel of the mighty Emerge to anyone willing to listen. I've converted all 6 of the systems in my home, sparing them from the evils of the devil colored head covering (R3dH4t), I have shown them the true path to system maintenance, portage enlightenment, the all mighty depclean, and the benevolent forgiveness of revdep-rebuild.As such, I'm not opposed to tithing, giving back to the powers that be who have provided me with such joy and fulfilment in my administrative life. Please, let me know where I might deposit my offerings of PayPal, and I shall endeavor to help bring down the beastly costs of servitude and hosting of the powerful gentoo-portage.com.
Let us pray...
Our system, who art on raised tile,
Hallowed be thy OS.
Thy portage come, thy emerge be done,
On servers, as it is on workstations.
Give us this day, our daily sync,
And forgive us our broken ebuilds,
As we forgive those who break ebuilds against us.
Lead us not into dependency frustration,
But deliver us from rpm evil.
For thine is the make.conf, the USE flags,
And the profile forever...
Gentoo.Sincerely,
Jason Johnson
Unix Systems Admin
Oracle Corporation
On friday I will be posting a nice donators page, placing a donate button on every page and a couple other things (like donate $50 and get hosting for a year, etc.). However for those wanting to get donating early, here you go:
New Advertisements - 02/09/2006 03:01 GMT
Well, the google ads on this site just aren't pulling their weight. I made about $100 last month from just under half a million page views and that sux IMHO. I have decided to swap it out for some ebay ads.. see how that goes. Hopefully this new ad will actually allow me to cover the costs of hosting this site.
So if you feel like buying something from ebay feel free to click one of the ebay banners (I get paid on commission); the ebay one is on a 50% rotation for the month to see how it fairs.
I have also contemplated moving the advertisement, putting up a donations link, or perhaps do somthing else.. If anyone has any suggestions or just wants to throw in their 2 cents, feel free. I would love to hear what people have to say.
Quicker "Newest" pages - 19/06/2006 23:38 GMT
A user emailed me today to point out that the "Newest" pages we're taking upwards of 3 seconds to render; I had previously not noticed this. So I spent some time decreasing the render time and putting it below 0.5 seconds (and often lower). So you can thank Colin Kiegel for that.
Also pointed out to me was that packages such as app-editors/ne had extremely long bug lists due to their sot package name. I have fixed this by limiting the bug list to 30 and providing a link to bugs.gentoo.org if there are more then 30 listed.
If anyone else sees anything they feel should be fixed, email me. I'm always looking for things to do on the site.
Search Suggested... It's Back - 03/05/2006 23:40 GMT
Well last night after some hard work (not by me) the search suggest feature has been brought back. Its not complete, currently it only searches packages but I plan on adding categories and more later. For the current version you can thank Jeremy Kitchen and all his hard work.
Also today I am bringing back the Firefox search plugin. you can thank Francesco Aggazio for that one. You can download the files Here; a page will be made soon to include the javascript needed to add it automagically to your search bar.
My New Site - 25/04/2006 03:27 GMT
I don't know how many of you have been to my previous site (thrasher7.net), I never used it and it was just a WordPress install. But I've now started a new site: mikevalstar.com.
Some people I chat with on IRC have asked me to teach them how to use PHP in a "proper" way; templates, database abstraction, and reusable code. I had tried just some IRC "classes" but timing wasn't good for everyone. I've been working on this idea for a few months and have come up with a plan on how the site will work and grow. The site is a tutorial in and of itself; the tutorials written on the site will be the site itself. Right now the site is extremely bare, mostly because at this point it's just a "hello world" script.
I think this will be a great way for people who wish to learn PHP to learn it using proper techniques in a real world enviroment. Because this code is live, I won't be able to half-ass anything, so everyone should get a proper understanding of every aspect of a complete PHP-based website.
Subversion Repository - 14/04/2006 18:28 GMT
I finally got around to seting up an SVN repository for the website's code. Feel free to check it out and submit any code patches for the site you want (if your so inclined) to my email mikevalstar@thrashcorp.com. I'll be looking into adding a browser such as ViewVC later in the week.
also I'm looking for some more ideas for things to add to the site; comment on this post and help give me some ideas.
Lightbox update - 09/04/2006 01:16 GMT
Small update for today, been busy on the wiki.
The lightbox code has been updated to use lightbox 2.02 and each packages images have been put into a "slideshow" to make viewing all the images even easier.
And as an update to the image count.. we how have almost 1100 images and about 8.5% of the packages in the database now have an image. Thanks everyone and keep on uploading :).
Update: I have also now added a list of undocumented USE Flags, please submit some bugs to bugs.gentoo.org to help descibe these.