Moving to a New Home and Renovating
Once the National Bible Bee is concluded, Memverse is going to be simultaneously upgrading to a newer version of our framework (Ruby on Rails) and moving to a new hosting provider. The new framework will provide better performance. The new hosting provider will (we hope) provide more stability.
Here is what you need to know:
- We will give more details closer to the time but the current database will be migrated to the new server. There will probably be a brief period of down time during which Memverse will be unavailable. Our hope is that it will be no more than a few hours.
- We will be deleting from the database any users who have no memory verses in their account. If you would like to maintain your account, please make sure you add at least one memory verse.
- In future you will login using your email address.
Keep reading only if you like living on the edge
We would love people to try out the new site in advance. If you would like to do this, add the following line to your 'hosts' file:
173.255.223.25 www.memverse.com
You will know that you're on the new website because there will be a blog post that isn't on the current site. The database on the new site was copied over last night. Anything that happens on the new site will be overwritten when the migration happens. If you do try out the new site, please try and test all the various functionality and clearly report bugs. This will make the transition a less bumpy ride when it eventually happens. Remember that you will have to remove the line in the 'hosts' file to return to the original site.
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upgrade
Memverse 2.0
Well, we couldn't hold off on upgrading the website framework any longer! You will notice a few minor changes:
Faster
One of the biggest reasons to upgrade was for a snappier, more responsive feel. You will especially notice this in the feedback you get when you are memorizing. It had always bothered me that I never knew whether the feedback had been updated (as I toggled backwards and forwards between 'Christ Jesus' and 'Jesus Christ'). For those of you on very slow connections, that should now be clearer as we've added a little icon that shows when the feedback is complete. For the rest of you, you will notice that the feedback comes much quicker now.
Social Buttons
I do not have a tremendous fondness for Facebook but they now represent a quarter of all page views on the web and are the biggest source of new users for Memverse. You will notice that the blog pages now have Facebook 'Like' buttons. Over time we will roll out social buttons on some of the other pages which will enable you to push a link directly to your Facebook news feed. It's a great way to promote Memverse. One minor thing to note for now: it's better to click through to the blog post and click the like button on the actual post page. The 'Like' button on the blog front page is just a general link to the Memverse blog. For those of you who don't eat, breathe and sleep social networking, clicking on one of these buttons will push out a news item on your Facebook page.
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Upgrade
We will very shortly be upgrading the website to a more recent version of the framework software (Ruby on Rails 3.0). You probably won't notice much difference but it is a very big change that has required months of work. We're very close to being able to deploy the new version. Unfortunately, as happened this morning, there is a chance that as we test the new framework, the current site will come crashing down. We're hoping to minimize the outages as much as possible but if you see cryptic error messages and can't login, it's because we're stuck halfway down the upgrade path. Sometimes it's difficult at that point to know whether to try to revert back or keep pushing forward.
Update: our hosting company has decided to upgrade the entire server now so there is a small chance Memverse will disappear for a short while. Fear not, we'll be back.
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upgrade