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Jim's Lab Notes
— Site News, Baseball Talk, and a Bunch of Other Stuff

Sunday, April 13, 2014

We’re Moved! (And Burst.net can bite me!)

Update Wednesday, April 23rd at 8:30 AM: I’ve been working on the new site set-up. Although things are running pretty well, a few more tweaks should get it running better. I’m also prepping stuff for an upgrade of the site’s underlying CMS. At the same time I’ve been working on the new member group that I set up for contributors. At this point I need to start manually linking member accounts with Paypal. When that’s done I will also need to work on automating that process, although that will have to wait until the CMS is updated and the site is running to my satisfaction. Thanks again for your patience.

Update Thursday, April 17th at 11:00 AM: I’ve been bogged down looking for a fix to a domain redirect issue caused by a new php handler that I’m using on the server. For now using some of the old domain names will produce an error if you try to go to a sub-directory (like www.baseballprimer.com/newsstand/). I’ve decided to put off fixing this until later so I can get to some other things on my to-do list. At the moment I’m working on removing ads for people who’ve donated. With the way I have ads called in the old templates, it’s proving to be be a little time consuming. When I get this task done I’ll start moving people into the new member group I’ve set up to trigger the change. This will be time consuming as well as I will need to manually associate the donations with the accounts. Eventually I will automate the process but, for now, I’d appreciate your patience if it takes a few days to get rid of the ads on your account.

Update Tuesday, April 15th at 7:30 PM: Got a bunch of things done today. Except when I hosed the web server for a few minutes, things have gone pretty well. I’m still not happy with the way things are running but my mind is fried so it will have to wait until tomorrow. Thanks again for the donations. It’s very much appreciated. Assuming I get things running a little better tomorrow, I will start setting things up for those of you who donated. Hopefully, you can start viewing the site without ads by the weekend.

Update Tuesday, April 15th at 1 PM: Things seems seem to be running OK after a few tweaks. There is still work to be done squishing a few bugs (redirects are wonky once in a while). The site also needs some more performance tweaking. Those things will have to wait until a little later, however, because I need to get a little sleep before I make a really stupid mistake.

Update Tuesday, April 15th at 7:30 AM: The site is moved over to its new host. I have a lot of work to do getting the servers optimized. Please bear with me.

Update Monday, April 14th at 3:50 PM: I will be taking the old server off-line tonight between 3-4 AM to finish moving things over to the new server. There should be only a few hours of downtime but it might take longer for certain DNS server.

Update Sunday, April 13 at 7:30 PM: New server set up. DNS redundancy added. Extra domains moved over.Tweaking and testing tomorrow. One day ahead of schedule. Beverage time and GOT time.

I am moving the site to a new server host this week. On March 28th my server host, burst.net, disconnected my servers from their data center in Scranton PA, put them on truck, and took them to another data center in North Carolina. I was not given any notification prior to the move even though the move was planned in advance. During the downtime they did not reply to any tickets and, instead, provided an automated response that they were migrating servers. At the same time, they have been trying to charge my account for next month’s bill weeks before the due date. (Luckily I only transfer money into this account when I am ready to make a payment.) This simply is not acceptable, so I am moving the site.

I have taken a week’s vacation from my regular job to get this done. The tentative plan is to switch the site over on Tuesday night on April 15th or Wednesday night on April 16th, depending on my progress. Although I’m working to minimize the downtime and prevent avoidable problems, there may be times the site will be down. I will post updates on this thread, on Facebook, and on Twitter.

I apologize for the downtime and the inconvenience.

jimfurtado Posted: April 13, 2014 at 09:00 AM | 118 comment(s) Login to Bookmark
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   101. Mark S is still on target Posted: April 21, 2014 at 10:49 PM (#4690803)
I don't know if it means anything, but bbtf.org now redirects me to http://www.baseballthinkfactory.org/$1 which is definitely a mod_rewrite rule gone screwy.
It means you get charged $1 for using bbtf.org.
   102. Tulo's Fishy Mullet (mrams) Posted: April 21, 2014 at 11:16 PM (#4690815)
I donated a round number. My tax accountant says it draws less attention (I'm guessing that's a tax joke or something). Thanks for providing Jim.
   103. G.W.O. Posted: April 22, 2014 at 02:18 AM (#4690858)
Jim,

Ill donate some money if you please get rid of the bottom float-over ad that makes the BBTF experience so horrible on the iPad.
Theres a corner 'x' that supposedly gets rid of it, but it appears to require subpixel accuracy to hit it.

GWO
   104. Phil Coorey. Posted: April 23, 2014 at 12:37 AM (#4691678)
Donated 20.03

For 2003 , the first year I visited Primer - it helped after the ALCS fiasco believe me.

Hope everyone has been well

Appreciate everything Jim does , this website has had more hits from me than anything over the years , it's not even ####### close really

   105. Jarrod HypnerotomachiaPoliphili (TeddyF.Ballgame) Posted: April 25, 2014 at 12:25 AM (#4693762)
Just noticed the request to detail donation amounts. I kicked in $162, figuring that this place was worth at least a dollar a game. If the Mariners go to the playoffs, I'll owe you some more, Jim.

Don't hold your breath, though.
   106. Lassus Posted: May 15, 2014 at 07:05 AM (#4707161)
Is anyone else having problems with the site hanging and crashing browsers more frequently lately?
   107. ERROR---Jolly Old St. Nick Posted: May 15, 2014 at 08:28 AM (#4707186)
Is anyone else having problems with the site hanging and crashing browsers more frequently lately?

It's been a constant problem on Firefox, though until yesterday it had seemed to go away over the past few weeks. BTF is the ONLY website that causes this.

EDIT: And by sinister coincidence, it just happened again, and forced me onto Google Chrome.
   108. Publius Publicola Posted: May 15, 2014 at 09:00 AM (#4707206)
106. Lassus Posted: May 15, 2014 at 07:05 AM (#4707161)
Is anyone else having problems with the site hanging and crashing browsers more frequently lately?


I experience it using Firefox as well. I'd use Google Chrome but I dislike it, it's not as intuitive as Firefox.
   109. Jose is an Absurd Sultan Posted: May 15, 2014 at 09:34 AM (#4707231)

It's been a constant problem on Firefox, though until yesterday it had seemed to go away over the past few weeks. BTF is the ONLY website that causes this.


This has been my exact experience. Also on FireFox.
   110. villageidiom Posted: May 15, 2014 at 11:33 AM (#4707402)
It's been a constant problem on Firefox, though until yesterday it had seemed to go away over the past few weeks. BTF is the ONLY website that causes this.

This has been my exact experience. Also on FireFox.
It has happened to me on IE and FireFox. I don't recall if it has happened on Chrome.

What I noticed a while back was that it consistently happened to me coincident with the appearance of a Verizon ad. Whenever it froze/crashed, a Verizon ad was in the top ad space or on the sidebar ad. At some point I developed a tactic of looking at the ads as the page loaded, and if it was Verizon I immediately refreshed the page (before it could crash), and did so repeatedly until the page loaded with a different set of ads.

By "consistently" I mean "daily, for weeks".
   111. Bote Man Posted: May 15, 2014 at 12:14 PM (#4707438)
I have heard an outcry from my hacker (good kine) buddies about FF29, so I am remaining on FF28 for now. Their complaints were mostly aesthetic, but maybe there were some changes under the hood that cause these crashes.

Coincidentally, I ventured over to the Forum section here earlier and read a thread there complaining of similar problems that isolated it to some spurious ads that try to run scripts and play videos. It might be wise for those running Firefox to install NoScript to block the execution of scripts by web sites other than those that you explicitly add to the allow list. Then install AdBlockPlus to block the ads. Then, if you didn't do so during the Mass Outpouring last month, go send Jim some cashmoney in lieu of ad revenue; he mentioned a figure between $20-30 would be a reasonable recompense.
   112. villageidiom Posted: May 20, 2014 at 09:10 AM (#4710012)
What I noticed a while back was that it consistently happened to me coincident with the appearance of a Verizon ad. Whenever it froze/crashed, a Verizon ad was in the top ad space or on the sidebar ad. At some point I developed a tactic of looking at the ads as the page loaded, and if it was Verizon I immediately refreshed the page (before it could crash), and did so repeatedly until the page loaded with a different set of ads.

By "consistently" I mean "daily, for weeks".
...and it's happening again. It's the ad at the top of the page, blue sky with some guy on the right looking at his phone. Red banner comes across the add, with the words "leave your". The browser freezes at that point.

Same ad sometimes appears on the side, and doesn't seem to cause a freeze. It's a Verizon ad.
   113. Hot Wheeling American Posted: May 20, 2014 at 09:19 AM (#4710016)
I haven't been able to source it one particular ad (though I would kill for some cell phone ads - I'm stuck with awful (awful) looking diet images), but yesterday's crashes on IE were particularly bad. Like everyone else, this is the only site on which this happens to me. I vaguely recall talk of users who donated being able to avoid ads when logged in, but I assume if that can even happen, it's a long ways off.
   114. villageidiom Posted: May 20, 2014 at 09:37 AM (#4710026)
Just as a hunch, I clicked on the "adchoices" thing in the top right of the ad (little blue triangle) before the browser froze and it brought me to a screen where I could opt out of targeted ads. I opted out of everything. Now I'm getting the ad, but it's not freezing anything. So there's that.
   115. People like Zonk and Chris Truby Posted: May 20, 2014 at 09:53 AM (#4710036)
I think it's the adserver choices.truste.com (identified as Valueclick01 in the header)....

I'm freezing in Firefox fairly often - and running a few sessions through Fiddler - this is the culprit that consistently seems to hang when the page freezes and CPU spikes for the browser. It's a JS ad -- and the inspector log in fiddler claims that there is invalid text in the script at position 45...



   116. Never Give an Inge (Dave) Posted: May 20, 2014 at 10:06 AM (#4710051)
I would say this site freezes my browser about 10% of the time I try to load a page, but yesterday it was closer to 80%. Either one of those basically makes it not worth visiting the site, unfortunately.

I also now get an error message every time I visit BBREF, although that doesn't actually freeze my browser.
   117. Bote Man Posted: May 20, 2014 at 10:36 AM (#4710081)
Post #111 outlines the solution for Firefox users. The means exist, so it's up to you if you want to solve the problem or not. I don't expect the ads to stop by themselves.
   118. Hot Wheeling American Posted: May 20, 2014 at 10:56 AM (#4710094)
Stuck with IE at the office. I don't expect any tears from boteman and though internet browsing during work hours is more under control than a few years ago, this is the only site I come across with any issues.
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