Server Move Update
The astute amongst you may have noticed that DearDiary still hasn't moved to its new home. There's a good technical reason for this lack of motion. The server we're moving to has some resource restrictions (notably the number of files it can contain) and there's some legacy parts of the system which use a number of files ( for example, the notification email template ) instead of database rows. This amounts to something close to half a million files on the system that shouldn't be files but should be database rows.
The new server allows only a million files – so over half would be taken up with just DearDiary message files (add Hamipiks images, and customized buttons and other DD images) and that doesn't leave much for anything else.
What does this mean? Well, I'm glad you asked 🙂
It means I have to firstly import all those messages into the DD database system (which means only 3 files are used to store all those messages), which is where all the entries, comments and configuration data is kept. I then need to rewrite the parts of the system that look for information from those files to instead look in the database. So it's a little bit of work. But the pay off should be good, it'll scale better (though with only 25 diaries a day being updated it's hardly a load on the server any more).
So that's where we're at. If anyone has any ideas on how we can improve the number of people using the site each day let me know 🙂 It'd be nice to get back to the days where 200 or more diaries were being updated each day!
Would people prefer a WordPress type of system which allows plugins and themes, or is DearDiary the way you like it?